Moscow police, searching a private apartment in a town south of the capital, found a huge cache of explosives and remote-controlled bombs hidden inside a collection of beer cans, a police spokeswoman said Friday.


Anya Boldyreva, a spokeswoman for the city organized crime department, said police had found the cache Wednesday in an apartment in Vidnoye, 23 kilometers south of Moscow.


"There were two 5-liter and more than 10 ordinary foreign beer cans filled with an explosive mixture and prepared to be used as radio controlled bombs," Boldyreva said.


She said police had also found 30 kilograms of different explosive solids, as well as detonators and several sophisticated radio controlled explosive devices.


"It is the biggest store of explosive devices found by police in Moscow over this year," she said.


Boldyreva said the police had found the cache by following a Zil truck containing mines, grenades and bombs which had been discovered Sunday by the agents of the Federal Counterintelligence Service on Spartakovskaya Ploshchad, central Moscow.


"We organized surveillance over the truck and in a couple of days saw how three men took some explosive devices and a grenade thrower and went to that apartment," she said.


Boldyreva said police had detained the three men.


"They managed to sell the grenade thrower, but we know who bought it," she said.


She said the apartment had belonged to a radio electronics engineer who had worked in one of the state secret scientific institutes. But she declined to identify the engineer.


Andrei Kostromin, a spokesman for the city counterintelligence department, said the number of bomb attacks investigated by their specialists had increased by 1.5 percent over the first 10 months of this year compared with the same period last year.