Daily US Times: Two men, a British and an Australian, working for an aid agency which helps dispose of unexploded bombs have been killed in an explosion in the Solomon Islands.
Australian Trent Lee and Briton Stephen Atkinson were employees of Norwegian People’s Aid.
The blast took place on Sunday in a residential part of the capital Honiara.
The Solomon Islands was a WW2 battleground in the South Pacific, are littered with thousands of unexploded bombs.
The Norwegian People’s Aid (NPA) described the explosion as a “tragic accident”.
The agency’s Deputy Secretary General Per Nergaard said an “investigation needs to be completed before there can be a conclusion on the cause of events”.
Its Secretary General Henriette Killi Westhrin added that it was “devastated by what has happened”.
On his Facebook page, Lee had described himself as a Chemical Weapons Advisor, adding that his role was “to survey and locate the items, then hand information over [to] the Solomon Islands Police Explosive Ordnance Disposal team”.
A statement from the Royal Solomon Islands Police Force confirmed this saying that the survey team typically goes out first to confirm the location of unexploded ordnances before relaying the information to them.
The NPA said they were assisting the government in developing a centralised database “that gives an overview of the extensive amounts of explosive remnants of war contamination dating from the Second World War”.
Workers had been in the capital Honiara clearing sites of bombs ahead of the 2023 Pacific Games.
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