By IANS,
London : There may be an unexploded Nazi bomb under the Olympic stadium in Britain, a media report said Sunday.
The device is feared to be near the surface of the main stadium where the Queen and other world leaders will gather in 2012, the Daily Express reported citing government records.
It is listed on the ministry of defence’s “abandoned bomb” register, compiled from official records kept during the World War II.
The list shows that a bomb of an unknown size was thought to have been dropped by Hitler’s Luftwaffe into a landfill site during the Blitz.
The site is now the location of the 500-million pound Olympic stadium in Stratford in east London.
Britain’s Olympic bosses were aware the bomb might be there, but decided against launching a specific search prior to construction.
The potential presence of the bomb was one of the reasons for the resignation in 2006 of Jack Lemley, the former chief executive of the Olympic Delivery Authority (ODA), who claimed that the Labour government and ex-London Mayor Ken Livingstone pressured his team to cut costs.
Although the bomb was never found during the excavations for the stadium, the ODA Saturday insisted the site was “safe”.
The bomb is thought to have fallen in 1941 at the height of the German air campaign against British cities.
A wartime bomb disposal team was sent to probe, but the soldiers failed to find anything because of the large amount of metal debris there.