Berlin Police Defuse WW2 Bomb After Mass Evacuation

Image: Britta Pedersen/DPA/PA Images.

Berlin police evacuated thousands of people from a central area of the German capital and shut down the main train station as a precaution while they defused an unexploded Second World War bomb found during construction work.

About 10,000 residents and workers were forced to leave a square-mile area while bomb experts removed the 500-kilogram (1,100lb) British bomb dropped during the war.

Bomb disposal experts were able to successfully remove the detonator just after 1pm and destroy it in a small controlled explosion.

The evacuation area, which centred on the construction site north of the train station, also included a hospital, the new offices of Germany's foreign intelligence service, and parts of both the economy and transportation ministries.

German rail operator Deutsche Bahn prevented trains from stopping at the railway station from 10am and through traffic was shut down at 11.30am before experts began their work.

Some 300,000 travellers use the station every day.

More than 70 years after the end of the war, such discoveries are common in major German cities; last September, hospitals in Frankfurt were evacuated in order to allow for a controlled explosion of another wartime bomb.