A critical section of German autobahn was in disarray on Tuesday night after being blown up by a World War II bomb.
Returning German and Dutch holiday-makers had their plans thrown into chaos after the 500kg bomb exploded, creating a crater 25 metres wide and four metres deep in the A3 autobahn at Offenbach.
Police spokesman Ingbert Zacharias said all of the lanes between Frankfurt and Wurzburg have been closed indefinitely after the explosion of what was first thought to be a dud Royal Air Force bomb.
Frankfurt Airport, Germany’s busiest and the third busiest in Europe, was forced to suspend landings on its southern runway for an hour, with the bomb sited directly beneath the approach path.
The A3 at Frankfurt is the eighth busiest autobahn in Germany, with more than 150,000 cars a day travelling along it, and was in the process of being upgraded to eight lanes.
Construction workers found the bomb as they added extra lanes to the autobahn and called in the police. Initially thought to be a harmless relic bound for a museum, it instead was found to be very live indeed.
Disposal experts created a safety zone with a 1km radius around the site and evacuated 160 people from their homes in the south of Offenbach before trying to defuse the bomb via a chemical-mechanical fuse.
That failed and they were forced to set it off late last night in an explosion heard more than 15km away, according to reports from the German newspaper Bild and other German sources.
The A3 runs from Austria to The Netherlands, swinging past Oberhausen, Duisburg, Dusseldorf, Leverkusen, Cologne, Weisbaden, Frankfurt, Wurzburg, Nuremberg and Regensburg, and is the major link between southern Germany and the industrial Rhine-Ruhr region.