Czech police safely detonate World War Two bomb at oil refinery

PRAGUE (Reuters) -Czech bomb disposal experts on Friday detonated a World War Two bomb found on the site of an oil refinery, causing no major visible damage to the Polish-owned plant that has halted operations since the discovery last week, police said.

Police had prepared for the controlled explosion for several days, creating a wall of sandbags around the bomb at the Litvinov refinery, which is operated by Orlen Unipetrol, a Czech unit of Polish refiner Orlen.

The 230-kg (507-pound) bomb contained about 100 kg (220 pounds) of explosives, Orlen Unipetrol said in a statement, adding that it was monitoring and assessing the impact of the controlled blast on the site’s equipment and infrastructure. “Once we have verified the state of all the technologies and we are really sure that we can safely resume production, we will proceed with the gradual restoration of production,” Mariusz Wnuk, chairman of the board of directors of Orlen Unipetrol, was quoted as saying.

“We expect that after such a large-scale shutdown of all production units, it will take at least a few days.”

Last week, the company said the refinery would likely be restarted in early September.

(Reporting by Jason Hovet, Jan Lopatka and Marek Strzelecki;Editing by Ros Russell and Helen Popper)