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Monday 21 February 2011
Japan probes WWII prisoner experiment site
The site is linked to Unit 731 of the Japanese Imperial Army, which carried out experiments in germ warfare on prisoners. The excavation was ordered after former nurse Toyo Ishii spoke out
Excavations are beginning at a former medical school in Tokyo which may reveal grisly secrets from World War II.
The site is linked to Unit 731 of the Japanese Imperial Army, which carried out experiments in germ warfare on prisoners.
Japan’s government has never formally acknowledged the atrocities took place.
It ordered the excavation after a former nurse came forward to break 60 years of silence.
The woman, now 88, said she and colleagues were ordered to bury hundreds of bodies after Japan’s surrender at the end of World War II.
The job had to be finished before American troops arrived in the capital.
The site from which an apartment block has been cleared for the digging was the Tokyo headquarters of Unit 731 of the Imperial Japanese Army.
Historians and witnesses say it subjected many thousands of prisoners in occupied northern China to barbaric experiments, searching for advances in biological warfare.
Some were injected with diseases and then dissected alive, others frozen to death to test their endurance.
The site being excavated is close to another where fragments of bone, many showing saw marks, were found in 1989.
Then the health ministry concluded that they could not be linked to Unit 731.
Requests for DNA testing from Chinese families whose relatives are believed to have fallen victim to medical experiments were refused.
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Japan probes WWII prisoner experiment site
By Roland Buerk BBC News, Tokyo
21 February 2011
Excavations are beginning at a former medical school in Tokyo which may reveal grisly secrets from World War II.
The site is linked to Unit 731 of the Japanese Imperial Army, which carried out experiments in germ warfare on prisoners.
Japan’s government has never formally acknowledged the atrocities took place.
It ordered the excavation after a former nurse came forward to break 60 years of silence.
The woman, now 88, said she and colleagues were ordered to bury hundreds of bodies after Japan’s surrender at the end of World War II.
The job had to be finished before American troops arrived in the capital.
The site from which an apartment block has been cleared for the digging was the Tokyo headquarters of Unit 731 of the Imperial Japanese Army.
Historians and witnesses say it subjected many thousands of prisoners in occupied northern China to barbaric experiments, searching for advances in biological warfare.
Some were injected with diseases and then dissected alive, others frozen to death to test their endurance.
The site being excavated is close to another where fragments of bone, many showing saw marks, were found in 1989.
Then the health ministry concluded that they could not be linked to Unit 731.
Requests for DNA testing from Chinese families whose relatives are believed to have fallen victim to medical experiments were refused.
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