Hanoi - Four men were killed while sawing a 250-kilogram bomb to extract explosives and metal scraps to sell in Vietnam, a local official said Thursday. "Our commune lies along Ho Chi Minh Trail where the US Air Force dropped a lot of bombs during the Vietnam War in order to stop the northern soldiers moving to the south," said Truong Quang Than, chairman of Bac Son Commune in Quang Binh proivince in central Vietnam where the incident happened.
Vietnam Television Corporation on Thursday reported the explosion took place on Monday on the side of the Ho Chi Minh Trail while a group of five people searching for war scraps found the bomb. When they were trying to open it, the bomb exploded and killed four of them instantly.
"The only one who luckily survived was seriously wounded and is in a state of panic now," said Than. "This is the third time a war-era bomb killed our people within three years. Two people were killed in two bomb explosion in two other cases in 2006."
According to the United Nations, 104,000 Vietnamese have been killed by bombs, land mines and artillery shells since the end of the war in 1975.
