Deadly relic from WWII closes airport in London

LONDON — An airport in London was shut down Sunday night and Monday by a relic of World War II: a 1,100-pound unexploded German bomb discovered during construction work.

The airport, London City, is in the Docklands, an industrial area considered crucial to Britain’s war effort, and many banks and other financial institutions today have their offices in the nearby Canary Wharf neighborhood.

London was peppered with thousands of German bombs in 1940 and 1941, a period known as the Blitz. Unexploded devices from that era, including grenades, are removed every year from backyards, fields and construction sites. The docks were hit particularly hard.

The latest bomb was found Sunday at the King George V Dock, one of the docks between which the runway sits, airport officials said.

All flights in and out of the airport were canceled Monday, and the Royal Navy said it had put in place an exclusion zone of m0re than 700 feet to “ensure that the ordnance is safely dealt with.”

Navy bomb-disposal experts were expected to detonate the device on Tuesday in a controlled explosion at the bottom of the Thames.

More than 20,000 bombs fell on London during the Blitz, killing about 32,000 civilians and destroying 60 percent of houses in the city. The Construction Industry Research and Information Association estimates that about 15,000 devices were removed at sites in Britain from 2006 to 2009.