Six people in Vietnam were killed when a wartime era bomb exploded in the nation’s Khanh Hoa province on Friday and struck a residential building, according to local reports.
The incident took place in a mountainous area close to To Hap town, with Baomoi reporting that the victims have been identified as members of the same family. Four children are among the dead.
According to the VN Express, one of the residents of the property had earlier collected the dormant explosive, thought to be a shell or mortar, in order to harvest it for scrap metal.
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RT.com has contacted the Vietnamese local government for further details.
Images of the aftermath show emergency personnel transporting an injured person from the scene on a stretcher.
More than 40 years since Vietnam War hostilities ended, the country continues to be plagued by remnants of the conflict.
According to Bombicen, an affiliate agency of the Vietnamese Ministry of Defense, approximately 800,000 tons of the explosives used in the war remains hidden within the country’s terrain.
The leftover ordinances include deadly mines, which the agency says contribute to the contamination of around 6.6 million kilometers of land.
It’s estimated that more than 40,000 people have been killed by left-over explosives from the conflict, which finally came to an end in 1975.
As a result of the ongoing threat, a number of independent organizations have become involved in clearing villages of conflict material, including the Danish Demining Group.
Members of the group have been working to safely dismantle devices in the Quang Nam and Duy Xuyen areas since 2012. It describes Vietnam has “one of the most heavily bombed countries in the world.”
“This legacy has, for generations now, posed a hazard especially for the rural poor in Vietnam and will do so for generations to come: more than 18.82% of Vietnam is estimated to be contaminated with ERW (explosive remnants of war),” the Danish Demining Group explain.
