A German World War I hand grenade was found among a shipment of French potatoes imported for a Hong Kong potato chip factory, police said.
The device was safely detonated after it was discovered at the Calbee snacks factory on Saturday.
“The grenade was in an unstable condition, because it has been previously discharged but failed to detonate,” Superintendent Wilfred Wong Ho-hon (黃浩瀚) told reporters.
Photo: AFP / Hong Kong Police Force
Police detonated it on site, Wong said, with a police video showing bomb disposal officers packing the grenade in a drainage channel at the factory before blowing it up.
The grenade was 8cm wide and weighed about 1kg.
“All the information to date suggested that the grenade was imported from France together with the other potatoes,” Wong said.
The grenade is believed to have been left in a trench during World War I and accidentally gathered up with potatoes planted a century later in the former battlefield.
“If it was covered in mud, the grenade was likely to have been left behind, dropped by soldiers there during the war, or left there after it was thrown,” Dave Macri, military historian at the University of Hong Kong military historian, told the South China Morning Post.
“The ditch was then filled up and used as a growing field, and the explosive was tossed into the mix of harvested potatoes ... and sent to Hong Kong,” he said.
Hong Kong police are used to dealing with old munitions, though more usually US bombs dropped on the territory after it fell to the Japanese during World War II.
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