It was the second time within a week that an American bomb dropped during World War Two had been discovered at a harbourfront construction site in Wan Chai.

Police sealed off parts of the district after a worker found the device on Wednesday morning, with 4,000 people evacuated and ferry services across Victoria Harbour suspended as bomb disposal experts worked through the night.

“Bomb disposal operations are dirty, difficult, and dangerous. In this particular case, all three were true,” bomb disposal officer Alick McWhirter told reporters.

The rain, tricky location, and a fuse mechanism that the team “couldn’t even see” all added to the challenge, McWhirter said.

The experts cut a large hole through the shell to burn off explosive materials inside before a crane lifted the earth-covered bomb off the site on Thursday.

Unexploded wartime bombs or grenades are frequently found by hikers and construction workers in the city, which was the scene of fierce fighting between Japanese and British forces in 1941.

In 2014 police defused a wartime bomb weighing nearly one ton, the largest yet found in the city.