A 74-year-old Italian grandmother who bought a sack of potatoes at her local market found a live grenade among the spuds.
“I found a bomb in the potatoes,” Olga Mauriello said.
“I went to the market to buy some potatoes, and that’s where the bomb was. But this bomb was covered in dirt, and I put it in water and got all dirt off. And then I realized, ‘It’s a bomb!’”
Police said the pine cone-shaped grenade, which had no pin and was still active, was the same type used by U.S. soldiers in Europe in World War II. Authorities believe the mix-up happened at a farm in France, where the grenade was plucked from the ground along with potatoes.
To the woman’s relief, police and explosives experts in the small town of San Giorgio a Cremano, near Naples, recovered the grenade and safely detonated it on Wednesday.
But Mauriello was still shaking off her close brush with death. It didn’t look like a potato and it was heavier than one. But what if she had cooked it?
“If I hadn’t felt its weight, I wouldn’t even have realized that it was a bomb,” she said.
Officers detonated the grenade in a park on Wednesday, state police said.
