Britain’s mysterious WW2 “island of death”

In the 1960s, the BBC set out to investigate local reports of secret, shocking World War Two experiments, dangerous contamination and unexplained animal deaths on a remote island off the coast of Scotland.

It was an environmental catastrophe. The island remained dangerously contaminated and a no-go area for nearly half a century, until, on this day in 1990, the UK government finally declared Gruinard Island safe.

The truth was that Gruinard Island had been the site of a clandestine attempt by the UK during World War Two to weaponise Anthrax, a deadly bacterial infection.

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