Offices evacuated, ferries cancelled, roads closed and school sports meeting cut short as police begin operation expected to last through the night
The bomb is suspected to be the same model as the one defused last week at the same location. A second bomb was found this morning at the same construction site where a 450kg (1,000lb) wartime explosive of the same model was unearthed over the weekend.
Emergency services were called in after the bomb was found on the site, which sits at the junction of Convention Avenue and Tonnochy Road in Wan Chai.
A police report was made at 11.15am. A spokeswoman said the force’s bomb disposal officers had been deployed.
Initial examination showed the device was the same model as the one found over the weekend, according to a police source. He added that nearby roads would soon be closed.
A pedestrian bridge leading to the Wan Chai Sports Ground and the Harbour Sports Centre was also closed off at about 1pm.
At the time of the discovery, an interschool athletics meet was taking place in the stadium, and all the students had to be evacuated soon after.
Valerie Piper, whose 15-year-old son had been at the meet, told the South China Morning Post outside the stadium: “My son called me at 1.05pm saying, ‘Mum, where are you?’ They had to evacuate the stadium and cancel the finals because there was a bomb found.”
Secondary school pupil Shelley Lai Ka-yi, 14, said about 300 to 400 pupils from about 40 schools who were at the event had to clear out of the stadium.
“We saw groups of police coming in, and we were told the competition had to be cancelled and we had to get out,” Lai said.
The match was supposed to go on until 4pm. Lai said her teachers were told to bring their classes back to school for lessons for the rest of the day.
Next to the stadium, Sun Hung Kai Centre, a high-rise office complex, was evacuated at about 1.30pm. Restaurants in the building also started to shut their doors and would not take new diners.
Management and reception staff at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre and the Renaissance Harbour View Hotel, which was evacuated over the weekend when the previous bomb was found, said they had yet to receive any emergency alerts or notice from police to clear out.
On Saturday, police carried out a major bomb disposal operation, closing roads and evacuating 1,300 people.
The American-made AN-M65, which was 140cm long and 45cm in diameter, was buried 25 metres deep at the site. Demolitions experts defused the bomb at about 1pm on Sunday after 25 hours of road closures and mass evacuations in the area.
The device, dating back to the second world war, is thought to have been dropped by US warplanes sometime during Japanese occupation of the city, between 1941 and 1945.
Police said the 225kg of explosives inside the device could have sent shrapnel flying up to 2km if it had gone off.
In January last year, a 220kg unexploded US wartime explosive was found at a construction site in Pok Fu Lam. The airdropped bomb – model AN-64 – contained about 120kg of TNT explosives.
Police said at the time that officers believed it had also been dropped on Hong Kong during the second world war.
In 2014 another unexploded AN-M65, weighing 900kg, was found at a construction site in Happy Valley.