Residents have been evacuated and trains stopped or diverted in the German capital, Berlin, as bomb disposal experts defused an unexploded World War II bomb.
The 100-kg bomb was found on a building site near Berlin’s main train station late on Tuesday, a police spokesman said.
The spokesman also stated that the bomb had been dropped by an Allied plane during World War II, with experts believing that it was a Soviet bomb.
“The operation to defuse the device took about half an hour. Everything went according to plan,” the spokesman added.
About 840 people were evacuated from the area before the disposal operation began. The capital’s north-south rail traffic was disrupted and flights were diverted from the city’s Tegel airport.
German authorities believed that there were still some 3,000 unexploded bombs in the ground in Berlin, 68 years after the end of the Second World War.
In 2010, a 500-kg bomb, believed to be British, exploded in the central city of Goettingen. Three sappers were killed in the incident and two others were seriously injured.