Honiara explosion kills bomb specialists

HONIARA: An Australian and a Briton working to identify unexploded World War 2 bombs in the Solomon Islands have been killed in a blast in the capital, Honiara.

Australian Trent Lee and Briton Luke Atkinson died in a rented apartment in Tasahe in West Honiara on Sunday night (local time), Solomons police and their aid agency have confirmed.

Both men were bomb specialists working for an overseasfunded project that maps unexploded bomb sites for later disposal by specialist police teams.

Following the blast, residents rushed to the scene to find the men seriously injured, the Solomons Star newspaper reported. They were rushed to Honiara's National Referral Hospital.

One of the men died at the scene while the other was confirmed dead at the hospital.

The residential flats also served as the project office for the bomb survey team and investigators will try to determine why explosives were present.

The two men were working for Norwegian nongovernment organisation Norwegian Peoples Aid (NPA), conducting a nontechnical survey on the contamination of unexploded ordnances in the Solomons, the police media statement said. The US State Department funds the project.

NPA deputy secretarygeneral Per Nergaard confirmed in a statement that Lee and Atkinson had died in the blast.

The NPA has 1850 deminers working in 19 countries worldwide. Honiara is on the island of Guadalcanal, which was a major battleground when US forces invaded to dislodge the Japanese occupiers in World War 2.

A programme has been under way to clear unexploded ordnance in Honiara before the 2023 Pacific Games.