Chinese Minister of Environmental Protection has refuted doubts over the accuracy of the air quality test results in Beijing during the 2008 Olympics and blamed media's exaggeration of the capital's pollution.

Zhou Shengxian said during a panel discussion on Friday at the Global Think Tank Summit that an embassy in Beijing had installed its own air quality monitoring equipment for measuring PM 2.5 (particles less than 2.5 microns) and made assumptions that the air quality results for last summer's Olympic Games were inaccurate, Saturday's China Daily reported.

Zhou praised Beijing for its efforts in improving air quality.

Although Zhou refused to specify the embassy, his remarks have come after many media reports on the US embassy's monitoring in Beijing. The US embassy sends regular Twitter postings about the pollution levels based on its findings. It releases air quality data that differs widely from those released by the capital's environmental protection bureau.

Zhu Tong, an environment professor with Peking University, who participated in Beijing's Olympic air quality panel, said hundreds of experts from both China and abroad have made a systematic analysis on the data gathered from the capital's monitoring systems.

"They (the experts) have ensured the accuracy of the data during the Games," Zhu said.

(Xinhua News Agency July 4, 2009)