Hong Kong police finally defuse 450kg wartime bomb, 26 hours after it was unearthed
No one is injured after disposal team work through the night to safely deal with explosive found buried at Wan Chai building site
Bomb disposal officers on Sunday finally defused a 450kg (1,000 lbs) wartime explosive buried deep below a construction site in Wan Chai, after 26 hours of road closures, mass evacuations and a delicate operation to render it safe.
It was only the second time in Hong Kong history that such a large bomb had been discovered in the downtown area, and it brought parts of the district to a standstill.
Police experts began the final process to disarm the unexploded second world war ordnance, buried 25 metres deep, at 1am and accomplished their mission 12 hours later.
Using pressurised water and sanding, they cut holes in the cigar-shaped free-fall bomb to incinerate the explosive material inside before it could be safely removed from the site. No one was injured.
“The whole process was quite complicated. It took a bit longer than we expected,” said senior police bomb disposal officer Tony Chow Shek-kin, standing next to the hollowed out American-made AN-M65, thought to have been dropped by US warplanes sometime between 1941 and 1945.