A police officer blocks access to a street in Frankfurt, December 6, 2020. -
Frank Rumpenhorst / AP / SIPA
The discovery Thursday on a construction site of a bomb dating from the Second World War forced the authorities to take, for a few hours, a radical measure.
Some 12,800 people were evacuated on Sunday in Frankfurt, Germany's financial capital, where specialists defused the 500 kg weapon.
The construction site had to be cordoned off within a radius of 700 m because of the damage that the machine could have caused if it had exploded.
Train traffic disrupted
The bomb was finally successfully defused in less than two hours, firefighters said.
In addition to the 12,800 inhabitants asked to leave their homes, the circulation of certain trains had been diverted or postponed.
The evacuated area included retirement homes, heating and internet infrastructure, and facilities of the railway operator Deutsche Bahn.
Germany remains littered with unexploded bombs that are often found on construction sites, 75 years after the end of World War II.
Seven bombs were thus defused this year after being discovered on the first European site Tesla of electric cars which should be born near Berlin in 2021. Others were it this year in Cologne and Dortmund.
In 2017, the discovery in Frankfurt of a 1.4-ton bomb caused the evacuation of 65,000 people, the largest evacuation operation in Europe since 1945.
Did you see ?
Two hundred love letters from the Second World War found in a waste reception center in Charente-Maritime
World
Dangerous World War II bomb explodes when neutralized in Poland
Bomb
World
Second World War
Germany
Frankfurt
Demining