A sick woman is accompanied by medical stuff to a shelter as people leave their home area in the Gallus district in Frankfurt am Main, western Germany, during an evacuation on early morning of December 6, 2020. – A 500 kilogram WWII bomb was found and is to be defused today on December 6, 2020. Some 12.800 residents would be affected by the evacuation in a radius of 700 meters. (Photo by Armando BABANI / AFP)

Nearly 13,000 residents were evacuated in Frankfurt on Sunday as experts defused an unexploded World War II bomb, local emergency services said.

The 500-kilogramme (1,100-pound) British bomb had been found on a construction site in Germany’s financial capital on Thursday, the emergency services said.

A 700-metre (half-mile) evacuation radius was set up in the west of the city centre in an area that included a number of old people’s homes, heating and internet infrastructure and facilities of the Deutsche Bahn national rail operator.

The work was expected to continue into the evening because of coronavirus restrictions, the authorities said.

Some 75 years after the war, Germany remains littered with unexploded ordnance, often uncovered during construction work.

Earlier this year, experts defused seven World War II bombs found on the future location of Tesla’s first European factory, just outside Berlin.

Sizeable bombs have also been defused in Cologne and Dortmund this year.

In 2017, the discovery of a 1.4-tonne bomb in Frankfurt prompted the evacuation of 65,000 people — the largest such operation since the end of the war in Europe in 1945.

AFP