BBC News Online: World: Asia-Pacific

S Korea highlights germ warfare fears

The defence minister of South Korea has said that North Korea has the capability to wage germ warfare with its stockpile of bio-chemical weapons.

The minister, Kim Dong-shin, said the North had between 2,500-5,000 tonnes of biochemical weapons in six different facilities.

Mr Kim told a parliamentary committee that Pyongyang was believed to have stores of anthrax, smallpox and other types of diseases.

But he said there was no clear evidence linking the North with terrorist networks.

A United States official John Bolton told a United Nations conference to review the Biological Weapons Convention in Geneva on Monday that Washington believed North Korea was among several countries which were building germ-warfare arsenals.

From the newsroom of the BBC World Service