Agence France-Presse
September 13. 2003

China urges Japan to speed up disposal of WWII-era chemical weapons

BEIJING (AFP) Sep 13, 2003
The Chinese government has urged Japan to speed up the disposal of chemical weapons abandoned by its forces at the end of World War II, state media said Saturday.

"The Japanese government should provide overall statistics on its abandoned chemical weapons in China to the Chinese government," Ge Guangbiao, a chemical weapons expert employed by the Chinese foreign ministry, told the China Daily.

He said the Japanese information should cover the locations, numbers and categories of the chemical weapons left in China during the chaotic last months of the war.

Under the Chemical Weapons Convention, Japan has until 2007 to destroy all chemical weapons found in China, the paper said.

The call came as a team of Japanese experts were at work sealing 52 gas bombs found more than a decade ago in Luquan county near Beijing, the paper reported.

When they were discovered in 1991, the bombs poisoned about 20 locals, and they were subsequently stored in a mountainous area near Luquan for safety reasons.

Fifty-eight years after the end of the war, Japanese bombs continue to be unearthed on a regular basis in China.

Eighty bombs were discovered in Heze city in eastern Shandong province earlier this month.

Last month, one person died and more than 30 were injured last month by mustard gas dumped by Japan in northeast China.

China has been pressuring Japan to "remember its wartime aggression" and dispose of thousands of weapons left behind by its retreating armies.

A Japanese diplomatic source in Beijing said recently Tokyo had agreed to fund and organize China's expected billion-dollar clean-up of chemical weapons, but the problem was finding them.

Japan's occupation of Chinese territory before and during World War II remains a constant source of tension between the two countries.

More than 700,000 chemical weapons are estimated by Japan to have been abandoned by its armies.

Chinese experts say as many as two million such weapons are still buried, giving China the world's largest stockpile of leftover chemical weapons.