DARWIN, Australia — An Australian and a Briton working to map a deadly legacy of unexploded munitions from World War II have been killed in the South Pacific nation of the Solomon Islands after a bomb they were working on detonated. The blast occurred on Sunday inside the house that the two explosives experts were sharing in a suburb of the capital, Honiara. The police and the humanitarian group they worked for, Norwegian People’s Aid, expressed shock that the men had removed the munition from the field and taken it to a residential area. “We determine what to do with the UXOs after the survey has located them,” Clifford Tunuki, the police inspector, said of the unexploded ordnance in a statement released on Sunday. An official investigation is underway, and the site is being treated as a crime scene, he added.

Source: New York Times September 21, 2020 13:36 UTC