A man has been charged with assault after an FBI agent was shot by an improvised wheelchair in a booby-trapped house.

Officials say the wheelchair had been fitted with a fishing line, shotgun ammunition and other items – and was triggered when the FBI agent and a bomb squad opened the property's fortified front door.

Other traps were found throughout the house – including spike strips. A hot tub was also placed on its side and rigged to roll over anyone who triggered a tripwire.

Officers were asked to visit the home in Oregon on 7 September by an estate agent tasked with selling the property.

An X-ray later found a .410-gauge shotgun pellet in the agent's leg.

Gregory Rodvelt, a 66-year-old from Oregon, is accused of creating the makeshift weapons after he was forced to forfeit the property as part of an abuse case involving his mother.

A criminal complaint read: "(It was) much like a scene from the movie Indiana Jones: Raiders Of The Lost Ark in which actor Harrison Ford is forced to outrun a giant stone boulder that he inadvertently triggered by a booby trap switch."

Rodvelt has been in Arizona's Maricopa County Jail since April 2017, where he is in the midst of an assault trial in a separate case related to an alleged armed standoff.

He has refused a court-appointed defence lawyer, the Mail Tribune in Oregon reported.

In August, Rodvelt had been released from prison for two weeks so he could prepare to turn over the property.

Former military experts have inspected the property in the weeks since the agent was injured, a real estate lawyer said.

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