Japan Firm Beset by Poison Gas Scandal

By MARI YAMAGUCHI – Oct. 21, 2007

TOKYO (AP) -- Investigators launched raids this week on Japanese companies accused of corruption in projects to remove chemical weapons abandoned in China during World War II, officials said Friday, in an embarrassing scandal that threatened to further delay the decades-long cleanup.

Prosecutors searched the Abandoned Chemical Weapons Disposal Corp. on Wednesday, a company official said.

Agents raided an affiliated company, Pacific Consultants International, on Thursday and Friday, and the home of PCI's 71-year-old former president, a government official said. Both officials spoke on condition of anonymity, citing policy.

The allegations involve the illegal diversion of some of the $199 million the government has disbursed since 2004 to help dispose of 400,000 chemical weapons that retreating Japanese troops left in northeast China at war's end.

China says poisons have leaked from the weapons and killed about 2,000 people since 1945, compounding the enduring resentment over Japan's wartime aggression. The Foreign Ministry in Beijing expressed concern the allegations could delay the cleanup.

Japan is required to pay for the removal and to build a chemical weapons disposal plant in China under an 1997 international chemical weapons convention, but progress has been painstakingly slow.

Only 10 percent of the poisonous shells and canisters have been dug up so far, and Japan recently was forced to extend the deadline for complete disposal from this year for another five years, to 2012 — nearly 70 years after the war ended. Work on the disposal plant has not even begun.

Su Xiangxiang, a Chinese activist and lawyer on the chemical weapons issue, said he was not surprised by the allegations. He said he has urged the Japanese government to be more transparent about the funding for its cleanup operations.

"If the Japanese government says that the project is delayed due to the company's scandal, it is using the scandal as an excuse," he said.

The Abandoned Chemical Weapons Disposal Corp. and PCI are accused of misappropriating some $866,000 received from the government for the disposal, a Disposal Corp. official said on condition of anonymity, citing the case's sensitivity.

Investigators also suspect that Disposal Corp. and PCI illegally outsourced the projects to cover up their deeds, Kyodo News agency reported. The Tokyo District Prosecutors Office has so far refused to confirm details of the case.

Critics said the allegations further tarnish Japan's efforts to clean up the mess — material and emotional — that it left behind after its conquest of China in the 1930s and 1940s.

"Those profiteers were taking advantage ... preying on the very victims who should be helped by this project," said Norio Minami, a Japanese lawyer supporting Chinese injured by the poison gas. "Japan's loss of credibility is inevitable."

Northeast China was a central base of Japanese military operations on the Asian continent in the war. Tokyo used the area to stockpile chemical weapons produced in Japan.

A Japanese Cabinet Office official refused to say whether the scandal would delay the disposal work, but he insisted Japan's credibility would not suffer because the government is committed to the project. He spoke on condition of anonymity, citing departmental policy.

In 2003, one person was killed and 43 were injured when construction workers broke open a buried barrel of poison gas in the northeastern Chinese city of Qiqihar.

The plaintiffs have filed a lawsuit against Japan, demanding Tokyo cover their medical costs and income losses, saying one-time compensation of $2.6 million was not enough.