London Eye alert: German bombs spark mass evacuation by River Thames

A sunny Sunday morning in the heart of London was gripped by tension when the threat from a wartime bomb led to the evacuation of hundreds of visitors at a top tourist attraction

Police were called to the iconic big wheel , The London Eye, that is a feature of the London panorama, at 10:30 BST after a suspected World War I or World War II was discovered, according to the BBC. Two device was found on the foreshore on the River Thames where they could have buried in the mud for more than a century.

A tourist reportedly spotted the bombs and called the police.

Both the London Eye and Westminster Pier were evacuated due to an unexploded wartime era "ordnance". The landmarks are adjacent to Westminster Bridge which was the target of a car ramming and knife rampage by an Islamic terrorist in April, that killed five.

One American tourist, Samantha Shearman, came out of her hotel to find "police everywhere".

She took to Facebook to share pictures of officers standing behind cordons at the scene.

Samantha, from New Hampshire, told her friends: "Come out of hotel. London eye evacuated. Police everywhere. Now I'm pooping myself."

In 2105 a 550lb (250kg) device was found at a building site further down the river in Bermondsey, close to Tower Bridge.

The German Luftwaffe dropped 24,000 tonnes of high explosive on London in 85 major raids during the World War II.