World War II Airplane Bomb Explodes Near A Station In German: Four Injured, Train Travel Stops

Ilustrasi police line. (Wikimedia Commons/Tony Webster)

JAKARTA - Four people were injured when an old plane bomb exploded on a bridge near the busy Munich, Germany's main train station on Wednesday, police said on Twitter, bringing the number of injured to three earlier.

The explosion occurred while the site was being drilled to build a tunnel, police said, adding the area had been sealed off. The Munich fire department said one of the people was seriously injured.

Cited from Reuters, December 2, explosives experts were called to the scene to check for remains of the bomb, firefighters said.

Due to the explosion, train travel to and from the main train station was suspended, according to rail operator Deutsche Bahn. However, the trip was said to have resumed in the afternoon, citing the Associated Press.

Separately, Bavarian Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann said a 250 kilogram (550 pound) bomb was found during drilling work, German news agency DPA reported.

Herrmann said authorities must now investigate why it wasn't found earlier. He noted that such construction sites are usually carefully scanned beforehand for possible unexploded bombs.

More than 2.000 tons of live bombs and ammunition are discovered every year in Germany, more than 70 years after the end of the Second World War.

Second World War bombs were regularly found during construction work in Germany and were usually defused by experts or destroyed in controlled explosions. However, there have been cases of deadly explosions in the past.

Three police explosives experts in Goettingen died in 2010 while preparing to defuse a 1.000-pound bomb, and in 2014 a construction worker in Euskirchen died when his electric shovel hit a buried 4.000-pound bomb. In 1994, three Berlin construction workers were killed in a similar accident.

In 2012, a fireball lit up the sky in Munich, causing millions of euros in damage to 17 buildings, when authorities had to detonate a damaged 500-pound bomb. In 2015, a 1.000-pound bomb ripped through a three-meter-deep hole on a highway near Offenbach in central Germany.

To note, British and American warplanes hit the country with 1.5 million tons of bombs that killed 600.000 people. Officials estimate that 15% of the bombs failed to explode, some of which were buried as deep as six meters (20 feet) in the ground.