Floating World War II bomb kills in Burma
A bomb shell, dropped by Allied Forces during World War II, next to the fabled Bridge on the River Kwai. The infamous death railway was built by the Japanese between 1942-43 to move supplies from Thailand into Burma, now officially known as Myanmar.
More than 60 years after it was dropped from the sky in Burma, a World War II bomb killed seven after detonating in a remote province, AP reports.
The bomb was found floating in a river, dragged ashore and later exploded. According to AP, quoting an anonymous Burmese official, children account for two of the dead.
That the Western press is aware of this tragedy is a bit surprising. The explosion took place in an extremely isolated region, the western Rakhine province, in which travel is highly restricted. Its inhabitants are largely Muslim and sporadically subjected to forced labor by the military, according to the United Nations.
Burma must be one of the few countries so isolated that a bomb from the 1940s could evade discovery for six decades. It's well known that the war's old munitions are still scattered about — Rambo discovered a live World War II bomb in the Burmese jungles in "Rambo IV" — but this is the most fatal explosion in decades.
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