Experts from China and Japan finished on Thursday the job of recovering 542 chemical bombs that were abandoned by Japanese invaders during World War II.

Most of the bombs were found at a site two meters long, two meters wide and 0.6 meters deep in Douzhan Village, near Qiqihar City in northeast China's Heilongjiang Province. Only 21 of them were collected from a neighboring area.

The job of clearing and recovering went smoothly, with no incidence of leakage.

The joint team comprising Chinese and Japanese experts arrived at the scene on June 16, after a local farmer named Dong Liyan found the weapons on May 23. Dong's house, in the city's Ang'angxi District, was the site of a Japanese airfield and deployment regiment base during World War II.

The 30-member Japanese team was in charge of the recovery operation, and personnel from the Chinese Foreign Ministry, Defense Ministry and the Shenyang Military Area Command of the Peoples Liberation Army assisted.

Dozens of Douzhan Village residents and their livestock living within a radius of 60 meters around the site were evacuated when the weapons were found.

Bu Ping, vice president of the Heilongjiang Academy of Social Sciences and a researcher on chemical weapons left over by the Japanese troops in China, estimated that the Japanese troops left over 2 million chemical weapons in a dozen Chinese cities and provinces at the end of World War II.

Since the end of the war, some 2,000 Chinese have been injured by abandoned chemical weapons. Eight incidents have occurred in Qiqihar alone since the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949.

According to a treaty signed by the two countries, all chemical weapons left in China by Japan should be destroyed by 2007.

(Xinhua News Agency June 25, 2004)