Vietnamese children killed by cluster bomb

A cluster bomb left over from the Vietnam war has exploded and killed six Vietnamese children in the central province of Binh Dinh.

The children had found the device in a canal and were playing with it.

The Americans dropped hundreds of thousands of cluster bombs during the war, which ended in 1975.

Those that didn't explode on impact remain a deadly danger to anyone who handles them.

The latest deaths in Vietnam come only a day after a group of British aid organisations called for a global moratorium on the use of cluster bombs, saying they posed a long term hazard to civilians. The group said that in Kosovo alone last year, some two-hundred people had been killed or injured in cluster bomb explosions.

From the newsroom of the BBC World Service