Chunk of amber rock found in Sweden turns out to be WWII bomb

Leif Brost was suspicious from almost the first moment he saw the amber specimen.

It had got caught in the nets of a Swedish fisherman in the Baltic Sea, and he'd brought it to the obvious place: the Swedish Amber Museum that Mr. Brost owns. 

On first glance, it looked like a large chunk of valuable milky amber, which turns up on local shorelines from time to time. 

They told me to call the police immediately.- Leif Brost

But Brost soon suspected it was something else because of its density. It weighed two and a half kilos, much too heavy for a piece of amber that size. 

He thought it could be leftover munitions from the Second World War because the local waters off Sweden's southwest coast where it was found were heavily mined during the war.  

"I was not sure what kind it was," he says, explaining that amber is sometimes confused for mustard gas. "Sometimes people have been hurt from collecting mustard gas [munition casings] instead of amber."

Brost decided to hold onto it, storing it in his fishing hut, away from his home and the museum. 

"I was afraid [of an explosion]. That's why I put it down there on the coast because there's no people there. It's a private fishing hut."

Time passed, and Borst forgot about it until this past weekend, when he pulled it out to take to a local community centre that was hosting an open house. Hazardous materials officials would be on hand. 

"They told me I should call the police immediately." 

A Swedish bomb squad came two days later and took it away. They said it was a large trotyl, or TNT, bomb from the Second World War. 

"It is a kind of dynamite, but I didn't know if it was safe," he says, until the bomb squad told him there was little chance of it detonating because it didn't have a fuse. 

Still, Mr. Brost - and his wife - were happy to see it go.