Controlled munitions blast dazes Chinese village

By Staff
|
Google Oneindia News

BEIJING, Oct 29 (Reuters) The blast wave from a controlled detonation of old Japanese artillery shells shattered the calm of a village in northeastern China, sending 140 people, most of them children, to hospital suffering from shock, state media said.

Police in Heilongjiang province yesterday blew up 899 shells left behind by the Japanese army during World War Two, shattering windows in homes and a primary school about 1.5 km (one mile) away, Xinhua news agency said in an overnight report.

Three people suffered vomiting, seven had palpitations and one a scratch on his head but the others displayed no abnormal symptoms, Xinhua quoted doctors as saying. A total of 122 had already been discharged.

''Police said they double-checked the adjacent area to the site before explosion to make sure nobody was within the 1,000-meter warning line,'' Xinhua said.

But they received reports from the village about damage shortly after the operation, it said, adding that the windows had been repaired.

China says Japan abandoned at least 2 million tonnes of chemical weapons at about 40 sites across 15 provinces at the end of the war, most in the northeastern provinces of Heilongjiang, Jilin and Liaoning.

Japan puts the figure in the hundreds of thousands.

REUTERS SP BD1018

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