The Japanese Cabinet said Friday it will begin collecting and disposing of abandoned wartime chemical weapons in Dunhua, of China's Jilin Province, next week, with support from the Chinese government.

The project, which will run from Aug. 22 till Sept. 26, is the third in Dunhua. During the first and second time in October to November, 2005 and in May-June, 2006 respectively, a total of 605 shells of chemical weapons have been collected from Dunhua.

Chinese official statistics show that Japan abandoned at least 2 million tons of chemical weapons at about 40 sites in 15 Chinese provinces at the end of World War II, most of them in the three northeast provinces of Heilongjiang, Jilin and Liaoning.

In the past nine years, China and Japan have worked together to investigate, excavate, retrieve and pack the dumped weapons. So far 37,499 chemical weapons and 200 tons of contaminated items have been collected, but none have been destroyed.

More than 2,000 Chinese have fallen victim to Japan's abandoned chemical weapons, killed by leading toxic gas while working at construction sites or on other occasions, according to China's Foreign Ministry.

China and Japan joined the United Nations Chemical Weapons Convention in 1997. Two years later, they signed a memorandum, in which Japan admitted that it had abandoned a large amount of chemical weapons in China at the end of World War II.

Under the memorandum, Japan is obliged to remove the weapons by April 2007 and provide all necessary funds, equipment and personnel for their retrieval and destruction.

Source: Xinhua