A police chase which saw suspects ditch their car and flee on foot ended in officers finding a cache of “nasty” items in the vehicle – including a baseball bat wrapped in barbed wire.

The bat bears more than a passing resemblance to a weapon frequently used in the popular US TV series Walking Dead, which dramatises life in the days and months after a zombie apocalypse. 

The discovery was tweeted by PC Paul Glensman of Essex Police, who also tagged the actor, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, whose character Negan wields the bat. 

Morgan replied: “I’m in Georgia USA!!” in a bid to exclude himself from inquiries.

In the hit series, which is now in its seventh season, Negan is a vicious killer who uses Lucille to terrorise human survivors of an apocalypse and who fights gangs of zombies.

Earlier this year the actor quipped about his reviled character: “Really I have people look at me as if I am going to take out a baseball bat and crack them in the head at any given moment. When you’re playing a nefarious bastard that kind of comes with the territory and you have to embrace that and I have.”