Some 17 bombs, part of Japanese-abandoned chemical weapons in China during World War II, were revealed yesterday at another location in North China's Qiqihar.

The bombs, about 40 centimetres long, had been "hidden" under a haystack in the backyard of home in Old Sanjianfang Village in Qiqihar.

The village is just 10 kilometres from Touzhan Village in the Ang'angxi District, where a special team sent by the Japanese Government is excavating Japanese-abandoned chemical weapons found by a villager last month.

Chinese experts believe that at least 500 bombs, including a large number of toxic gas bombs, were buried by wartime Japanese troops at the site.

Coming across a couple of bombs in the city, which used to station a Japanese chemical weapons force, is no surprise to villagers who live in the town in Heilongjiang Province. So the bombs in Old Sanjianfang Village had not been reported to the local government for years.

"They were found by my husband some 20 years ago when he was plowing farmland," Fu Qingling, 51, told China Daily as she pointed to a field in the west.

"We thought they were just some useless bombs left by the Japanese soldiers, so we threw them in the backyard and didn't report them to the village authorities."

The illiterate woman said she did not know several barrels of mustard gas found in the city killed a person and injured 43 last year.

But she and her husband never told their 6-year-old twin granddaughters about the bombs and hid them under a haystack.

The "cover-up" did not work. The two little girls, wearing lovely skirts as they stood near the potentially deadly munitions, both told a reporter: "We knew they were bombs."

The Beijing News quoted a Chinese military expert as saying that these bombs are probably chemical weapons left by invading Japanese troops. Later, a China News Service report confirmed yesterday that preliminary findings showed they were Japanese-abandoned chemical weapons.

According to a Qiqihar government press official, Japanese experts and trained Chinese anti-chemical weapon soldiers have dug up 70 bombs in Touzhan Village in the first three days of work that began last Thursday. The excavation work will continue a few more days.

More than 700,000 chemical weapons are estimated by Japan to have been abandoned in China.

But Chinese experts say as many as 2 million such weapons are still buried, and remain a danger to unwary Chinese citizens.

(China Daily 06/21/2004 page2)