SYDNEY: Workers at a school in Solomon Islands discovered a buried stockpile of World War II munitions as they “dug a hole for sewage”, police said on Tuesday.

More than 200 rust-caked projectiles — which once belonged to US troops — have been dug up and removed after they were found near a school staff member’s house, the Royal Solomon Islands Police Force said.

Japan and the United States fought viciously to control the Solomon Islands at the height of World War II, littering the South Pacific archipelago with unexploded ordnance — or UXOs — that still take lives today.

Inspector Clifford Tunuki said the long-hidden weapons cache had been ferried away to a safe location and was now “waiting for safe destruction”.

The discovery was an “eye opener”, he added.

“The removal came about when the school discovered the stockpile of US projectiles in front of a staff house when they dug a hole for sewage,” police said in a statement.

Photos showed police removing the heavily corroded munitions by hand after digging them out with a shovel. Two foreign bomb disposal experts were killed in Solomon Islands’ capital Honiara in 2020 while working to map old weapons caches around the country.

Published in Dawn, August 21st, 2024