Active WWII bomb found

Some 1,500 people were evacuated from a shopping mall in Liberec after an unexploded 220-pound aerial bomb dating from World War II was discovered.

The Russian-made FAB-100 bomb was uncovered by construction workers at a site near a branch of the Sconto department store, firefighters said.

The device, packed with 110 pounds of explosive material, is filled with fragments designed to spread destruction over a wide area when dropped from overhead at speeds of up to 700 miles an hour.

"Because of the danger of an explosion that could have extended to an area of more than a kilometer, the Nisa shopping mall was evacuated and all approach roads were closed," said Zdenka Štrauchová, a spokeswoman for the Liberec Fire Department.

Managing Officer Lieutenant Josef Hanzl said it took some 45 minutes to empty the shopping center because customers inside did not realize the severity of the alert.

"While evacuating the shopping mall, we had problems, because many people thought it was only a drill," he said.

Pyrotechnic experts were called in to drive the bomb to a military area in Ralsko, north Bohemia, to be decommissioned, with firefighters riding along behind in convoy.

The operation saw personnel transport the device more than 35 miles through a thunderstorm in the early morning hours, Štrauchová said.

"The convoy got hit by a huge rain storm in Turnov, with lightning streaking across the sky, and the wipers were unable to clear the windscreen," she said. "For a while, officers couldn't see anything."

The alert was finally lifted at 6 a.m. July 20 when the device had been made safe.

Discoveries of this kind are relatively common, with two such alerts in the summer of 2010 alone.

In June 2010, 10 homes in a village near the city of Opava in Silesia had to be evacuated after the discovery of an even larger unexploded bomb dating from the same era. The device, uncovered in a field nearby Stará Ves nad Ondřejnicí, weighed some 600 pounds.

In July 2010, 40 people were evacuated from Velká Polom, a village near Ostrava, after a 110-pound bomb was found during construction work. Police later confirmed the find was a fully functional Soviet-made bomb also from World War II.

- Klára Jiřičná contributed to this report.

Bill Lehane can be reached at
blehane@praguepost.com