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One of Italy’s busiest airports has been forced to close as army experts dealt with 150kg of high explosive buried under the airport tarmac.

Rome’s Ciampino international airport was temporarily shut down after workers maintaining the tarmac uncovered metal objects that turned out to be three large German bombs from WWII.

Ciampino is Rome’s secondary airport. Flights there were diverted to Rome’s larger Fiumicino airport while bomb disposal experts safely dealt with the three devices.

Bombs from WWII surface periodically throughout Europe and beyond. Some are still capable of exploding and causing enormous damage.

A year ago, London City Airport closed while Britain’s Royal Navy worked with London Metropolitan Police to remove a 500kg World War II explosive device found in the River Thames.

AN EVEN STRANGER DISCOVERY THIS MONTH, dating back to an earlier war, was made in Hong Kong when a potato turned out to be a live hand grenade.

A delivery of potatoes shipped from France to a potato chip factory in Hong Kong contained a muddy German hand grenade, which looked just like a potato and was dug up by a harvester along with real potatoes.

It dated from World War I and was “in an unstable condition” because it had been discharged but had failed to detonate, officials told the South China Morning Post.

Experts safely defused the potato.

Last year, thousands of people were forced to evacuate a busy commercial area of Hong Kong while police defused a World War II bomb dug up on a construction site. It was the second to be found in Hong Kong within the same week.

The Japanese Army bombed Hong Kong’s old Kai Tak Airport in World War II as they attempted to disrupt a network of tunnels and bunkers built by the British and known as the Gin Drinkers’ Line. After 18 days of fierce fighting in an attempt to hold the Gin Drinkers’ Line, the Governor of Hong Kong, Sir Mark Young, surrendered to Japan on 25 December 1941 and Hong Kong was occupied for three years and eight months.

Written by Peter Needham