Experts start disposal of WWII chemical weapons

Experts from China and Japan on Wednesday started to recover more than 600 chemical weapons left by Japanese troops during World War II in northeast China's Heilongjiang Province.

The team will catalogue, pack and seal up the ordnance within the next 12 days, before it is placed in storage to await destruction.

The new batch of weapons was excavated in Wangkui County of Suihua City from June 27 to July 2, when workers were laying the foundations of a shopping mall. Some of the weapons have fuses.

On July 10, China and Japan completed a six-day excavation of 210 chemical weapons in Ning'an City, Heilongjiang Province.

It is not known how many chemical weapons were left in China by Japanese troops. From February 1995 to April 2006, Chinese and Japanese experts retrieved 37,499 such weapons.

Under the 1997 Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, Stockpiling and Use of Chemical Weapons and their Destruction to which both governments have acceded, Japan is obliged to destroy all the chemical weapons its troops had abandoned in China.

Source: Xinhua