Efforts to recover and dispose of hundreds of thousands of chemical weapons abandoned in China by the Imperial army at the end of World War II will take five years longer than planned, a Japanese official said Friday.
An international convention passed in 1997 requires Japan to remove the weapons by next April, but Japan and China requested a five-year extension to 2012 because of the large number of weapons yet to be unearthed.
The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, the Hague-based organization that oversees the treaty, approved the extension last month, said Keigo Akashi, a Cabinet Office official in charge of the weapons disposal project.