14kg of dangerous substances and improvised bomb found at abandoned school site in Hong Kong
- Pressure cooker and circuit boards also discovered at site police have used for training in the past
- Some of the chemicals appeared to be from batch reported lost by Polytechnic University after protesters’ occupation last year
Hong Kong police found 14kg of dangerous substances and an improvised bomb at an abandoned school in eastern Kowloon on Saturday, with a senior officer saying some of the chemicals appeared to be from the campus of Polytechnic University occupied by protesters last year.
The disused site on Choi Shek Road in Ngau Tau Kok had been used by officers in the past to carry out exercises, but none of those drills involved such materials, the police said.
The discovery is the 11th bomb case the force has handled since anti-government demonstrations broke out last summer and comes after a 60 per cent jump in the number of cases involving explosives in 2019 over the previous year.
Four people playing war games at St Joseph’s Anglo-Chinese School found the suspicious objects in the male washroom on the ground floor and alerted police at around 1.30pm.
Officers from the explosive ordnance disposal bureau arrived and roads around the area were cordoned off. They found about 10kg of chemicals and roughly 4kg of finished explosive substances, as well as the improvised explosive device, modified mobile phones, circuit boards and a pressure cooker.
“We are very, very worried,” said Senior Superintendent Steve Li Kwai-wah of the organised crime and triad bureau, noting pressure cookers were often used in terror attacks. “If these items still remain in the community, maybe it will cause a greater threat to social security.”