Local residents of the Korte Hemenweg in Stadskanaal are shocked after a bomb robot found a fake explosive in the night from Wednesday to Thursday.
“I went to bed at four o’clock at night with a headache,” says a local resident. She lives in the flat between Korte Hemenweg and Europaplein, right in the center of Stadskanaal. Residents look at the quiet street that mainly serves as a loading and unloading area and parking space for residents.
She went to the bathroom at 2:00 am, heard a lot of voices in the street and saw the fire brigade and police. A few months earlier, another car went up in flames in the street, so she decided to take a closer look. “For the same money I had to put my car away for a while.”
Martian
It didn’t come to that. “There were all barrier tapes and cars from the police and fire brigade. The police sent me away.” She did see how a bomb robot drove through the Korte Hemenweg. And a soldier from the Explosive Ordnance Disposal Service (EOD) walked around in a thick suit with a large helmet. “It looked like a Martian with a big lamp on his head.”
Another neighbor was also startled awake by the noise. “I put on my sweatpants and looked from above at what they were doing. There were long fire hoses everywhere. I thought it was scary. Scarier than when that car was on fire.”
Around 23:00 report
She saw the robot driving past the back wall of a loading and unloading area. “The man in the suit has also been very busy with a manhole cover there. Finally, they also put something in a bag.”
According to a police spokesman, a report was made around 10:50 p.m. that a strange object had been found on Korte Hemenweg. When officers arrived on scene, the reporter was there. “It looked like a pipe bomb,” the spokesman said. A pipe bomb is (often) an iron or metal tube with an explosive substance inside, which is sealed on both sides.
Cheesy prank or worse?
It was then decided to cordon off the area and to put all the bells and whistles on standby as a precaution. The EOD arrived a few hours later, it had to come from another part of the country.
After the special military department had investigated, it turned out not to be an explosive. The police seized it. The spokesman cannot say whether it is a prank, a piece of building material rolled away or a threat from a criminal angle. “That is unknown, we are conducting neighborhood investigations and collecting camera images.”
Local residents hope that this will remain the case, they are very shocked, says the resident who wanted to park her car at night: “You don’t want to experience this, do you?”