Experts have removed 31 bombs from a pit filled with abandoned Japanese chemical weapons and believe the cache near a school in China's northeast could hold more than 200 shells, a news report said yesterday.
The joint Chinese-Japanese team on Wednesday began excavating bombs and artillery shells that were buried after a factory received them as scrap metal.
Seven of the 31 bombs found were confirmed to hold poison gas, and the experts expected to find a total of more than 200 bombs, the official Xinhua news agency said.
Japan occupied China's northeast, also known as Manchuria, from 1933 until its wartime defeat in 1945. Tokyo says its retreating army left an estimated 700,000 shells with mustard gas and other poisons. China puts the number of abandoned weapons at 2 million, according to Xinhua.
Disposal of long-abandoned munitions is a rare point of agreement between the normally estranged Chinese and Japanese governments. An international agreement commits Tokyo to disposing of such weapons by next year. But the two governments want to extend that to 2012 because they have yet to destroy any weapons they have unearthed.
"We're not satisfied with the speed of processing the abandoned chemical weapons by the Japanese side in China," said Liu Yiren (
Japanese officials defended their handling of the weapons, saying they are asking the government for more money and staff.
"Basically, we are beefing up our efforts so that we can promptly respond to the issue. We are making efforts," said Keigo Akashi, official in charge of the issue for the Cabinet Office in Tokyo.
On Wednesday, Chinese and Japanese experts in protective suits carefully removed artillery shells and bombs from a shallow pit about 200m from a junior high school, where students played in an exercise yard.
Officials hoped to have the weapons excavated by next week and moved to a secure stockpile in preparation for destroying them, said Liu.
There are about 60 such sites in China, Liu said.
They are an enduring reminder and source of anger in China, where the government says at least 2,000 people have been killed by abandoned Japanese chemical weapons.
Abandoned chemical weapons "have been affecting the development of towns and cities where they are buried and threatening people's lives," Liu told reporters. In Ningan, "the local government has been presenting this issue repeatedly to the foreign ministry."
The bombs from Ningan are to be moved to a newly built disposal facility in Harbaling, a city in neighboring Jilin Province, where some 30,000 other chemical weapons already are stockpiled, Liu said.
In 2003, one person was killed and 43 others were injured when construction workers broke open a buried barrel of abandoned poison gas in Qiqihar, a city in Heilongjiang Province. It was the most serious incident in recent years.
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the