MOSCOW, January 5 (RIA Novosti) – A Russian man who found a stash of World War II-era mortar bombs blew one up near his house and attempted to sell the others, but was thwarted by police, the Interior Ministry said Sunday.
The man from Russia’s western Kaliningrad Region exclave “blew up one of the dangerous munitions near his house by throwing it onto a bonfire,” the ministry said in a statement. “He took the other six mortar bombs home and decided to sell them.”
The man was detained as the result of a police operation in which officers posed as potential buyers of the explosives, the statement said.
The suspect is an unemployed 29-year-old resident of the village of Medovoye who has previous convictions for drug dealing, police said.
The statement did not say how the man had come across the old munitions. Discoveries of WWII-era ammunition and weapons are not infrequent in Russia, and Kaliningrad – then known as Konigsberg, and part of Germany – was the scene of heavy fighting toward the end of the war.
