Riga region police officer Andrejs Sozinovs told Latvian Radio Friday morning that the reason for the potentially deadly stockpile remained unclear and refused to speculate on whether the munitions could have been assembled in order to perpetrate a terrorist act or could be the result of a rogue battlefield archaeologist.
“We are searching for the person who rented this garage,” Sozinovs said and confirmed that police visited the garage in connection with a criminal investigation launched on July 21.
“We were surprised that there could be so many explosives and that they could be so dangerous. The fact that they were kept so close to the centre of Riga is also strange, which is why we need to quickly find out what was their intended use,” Sozinovs said.
An army bomb squad worked at the garage for much of the day Thursday, closing nearby roads and evacuating neighboring buildings as a precaution while they made safe the stockpile which contained over one hundred items, believed to be mainly World War II era artillery shells.
