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A police car blocks a street in Gelsenkirchen where highly explosive chemicals have been discovered in an apartment
Photo: Caroline Seidel / dpa
In Gelsenkirchen, the apartment was supposed to be cleared out after the death of the resident, the eviction led to a large-scale deployment of fire brigade and police.
The landlord had encountered a large number of glass containers with chemicals when clearing out on Friday, as the fire department announced during the night.
The emergency services shared the suspicion that at least two of the bottles found contained dangerous substances.
The chemicals turn out to be dried picric acid, which, according to the fire department, is highly explosive in this crystallized state.
Therefore, experts from the federal police and the analytical task force of the Dortmund fire brigade were called in.
The specialists' examinations confirmed the suspicion.
Police posted a warning on Twitter to avoid the neighborhood:
As reported by the online portal "Der Westen", the amount of highly explosive substance should have been around 100 grams.
A police officer put the acid bottles and their explosive contents in a pressure-resistant special trailer - the experts then drove them to an open field.
Controlled demolition
"A controlled demolition there dissolved the problem in smoke within a second," reported the fire department.
The mission ended at 10 p.m.
The other substances that were found in the apartment are apparently not acutely dangerous according to the assessment of the experts.
They should be disposed of in the coming week.
How dangerous picric acid can be was shown by a catastrophe from the First World War: In 1917 a freighter carrying 2,300 tons of the substance exploded in the Canadian port city of Halifax after a collision.
The city was completely destroyed, thousands of people died.
The detonation is believed to be the largest non-nuclear explosion in history.
For a full account of this Halifax disaster, see: The Mother of All Explosions
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oka / AFP
