KUALA LUMPUR, MALAYSIA - TWO foreign workers in a Malaysian scrapyard were killed when a World War II bomb exploded as they were cutting up the 100-kilogramme device, reports said on Wednesday.

The victims, a Bangladeshi and an Indian man, died of their injuries shortly after the blast on Tuesday, which destroyed the scrapyard and a hostel located above it and blew out nearby windows, reports said.

The scrapyard owner told the Star daily he had purchased the bomb, which had been found by a passerby in an open area just north of the capital Kuala Lumpur, not realising it was a piece of unexploded ordnance.

There has been a recent spate of World War II relics being found in peninsular Malaysia with increasing development in rural areas.

The country was a battlefield when invading Japanese troops defeated British and Commonwealth forces during the Malayan Campaign from December 1941 to February 1942, and Allied forces later heavily bombed parts of the country. -- AFP