Bomb disposal officers dismantled a 450kg (1,000 lbs) wartime explosive buried deep below a Wan Chai construction site on Sunday following a delicate 12-hour operation that brought swathes of the district to a standstill, South China Morning Post.
Using pressurised water and sanding, operators spent hours cutting holes in the cigar-shaped free-fall bomb – buried 25 metres below the site – in order to incinerate the explosive material inside before it could be safely removed.
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, which was most likely dropped by US bombers sometime between 1941 and 1945
Chow stressed that this was only the second time in history that a bomb of such size had been discovered in an urban area.