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5 company officials arrested in Japan's scandal over WWII weapons removal in China - International Herald Tribune

Five Japanese company officials were arrested Tuesday for alleged fraud in a widening scandal over a government project to remove chemical weapons abandoned in China at the end of World War II.

The five from consulting firm Pacific Consultants International and its affiliate, Abandoned Chemical Weapons Disposal Corp., are accused of swindling about $1.1 million from the Japanese government, the Tokyo District Public Prosecutors Office said in a statement.

Relations between Beijing and Tokyo are sensitive because of Japan's invasion and brutal occupation of much of China in the 1930s and '40s. Japan is required to clean up its abandoned weapons under a 1997 international chemical weapons convention.

Since 2004, the Japanese government has disbursed $222 million to help dispose of 400,000 chemical weapons that retreating Japanese troops left in northeast China at the war's end.

China says poisons leaking from the abandoned weapons have killed about 2,000 people since 1945, compounding enduring resentment toward Japan's occupation.

In 2004, Pacific Consultants International established Abandoned Chemical Weapons Disposal Corp. as the sole agent to manage the government project.

But the project is far behind schedule, with only 10 percent of the poisonous shells and canisters recovered. Japan has been forced to extend the deadline for completing the disposal by five years to 2012, and work on a disposal plant has not even begun.

The project also faces opposition from Japanese conservatives who defend the country's wartime aggression in Asia and question the authenticity of the abandoned weapons.

Four other executives, including Tamio Araki, former president of Pacific Consultants International, were arrested in April in the case.

Northeast China was a hub of Japan's wars in Asia, and Tokyo used the area to stockpile its chemical weapons.

In 2003, one person was killed and 43 others were injured when construction workers broke open a buried barrel of poison gas in the northeastern Chinese city of Qiqihar.