China urges Japan to fulfil promise on chemical weapons

http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2...ent_582245.htm

Updated: 2006-05-03

Beijing is urging Tokyo to fulfil its promise to destroy chemical weapons abandoned by the Japanese troops in China in the 1930s and '40s.

China and Japan signed a memorandum in 1999 in which Japan agreed to provide all the necessary funds, equipment and personnel for the retrieval and destruction of all abandoned chemical weapons in China by the end of 2007.

Official statistics show that Japan abandoned at least 2 million tons of chemical weapons in about 40 sites in 15 provinces in China at the end of World War II, many of them in the northeast.

More than 2,000 Chinese have fallen victim to the chemical weapons in the past decades.

A toxic leak in August 2003 that killed one and injured 43 others in Qiqihar of Northeast China's Heilongjiang Province was the most serious tragedy in recent years.

__________________