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More than 40 plaintiffs in east China's Zhejiang Province seeking compensation for Japanese war atrocities between 1931 and 1945 have released a statement, condemning the Japanese Supreme Court, which had earlier overruled and dismissed their appeal.

"The ruling by the Japanese Supreme Court ignores the judicial responsibility of the Japanese government for biological warfare activities carried out in China ... (It) had full knowledge of Japanese biological warfare during World War II, one of the most despicable war crimes ever committed," the statement dated Friday said.

Chen Zhifa, 77, whose father and elder brother were both killed in 1942 by biological weapons, said: "This decision by the Japanese Supreme Court shows utter disrespect for the victims.

"We will carry on the fight until the Japanese government offers an apology and compensation," he said.

The epicenter of Japanese atrocities in China during the war years was Unit 731, a biological warfare unit headed by the infamous Shiro Ishii, based at Pingfang near Harbin in northeast China.

Unit 731 experimented on prisoners -- Chinese, Russians, Americans and others -- referred to as maruta. Unit 731 pretended to be a lumber mill and maruta is the Japanese word for logs. Not a single human "log" survived Unit 731.

The terrible experiments remained secret for a long time after the war, partly because of American collusion in keeping the incidents quiet.

The plaintiffs' statement was released at a press conference at the Japanese Germ Warfare Museum, located at an ancestral temple in Congshan Village of Yiwu in Zhejiang Province. Altogether, 404 villagers, one-third of the village population, were killed by plague in the autumn of 1942.

Another museum dedicated to Unit 731 is located in Harbin, in northeast China.

Wang Xuan, head of the delegation of plaintiffs, vowed to pursue research on Japanese germ warfare and continue to seek publicity for victims of it.

The lawyers' group for the Chinese plaintiffs issued a statement denouncing the Japanese Supreme Court's ruling as an injustice on May 10, a day after the ruling.

(Xinhua News Agency May 21, 2007)