Chinese find evidence of Japanese wartime germ tests on prisoners

Researchers in the eastern Chinese city of Harbin have found Japanese documents on people sent by Japan to a special unit for bacteriological tests during the Second World War, the Xinhua news agency reported on Thursday.

It said the 31 volumes of papers contain biographical and other details, including photographs, on people arrested by the Japanese army, and instructions on sending them to "Unit 731" for the tests.

The documents also contain orders signed in 1940 and 1941 by the commander of the Japanese army in China and the head of the Japanese military police in northeast China, and prove that the Japanese unit did commit crimes, the agency said.

It said that all the volumes have "special transfer" printed on them, which means that the people arrested were sent to Unit 731 to be used in experiments.

Chinese experts think these are the first materials written in Japanese of this kind to be found in China.

More than 3,000 people were used for germ experiments by Unit 731, according to an arrested Japanese army official in charge of germ experiments, the agency said.

BBC Monitoring (http://www.monitor.bbc.co.uk), based in Caversham in southern England, selects and translates information from radio, television, press, news agencies and the Internet from 150 countries in more than 70 languages.