Vietnam War Explosives Kill 10, Including Children
Updated 5:11 AM ET August 9, 2000
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HANOI, Vietnam (Reuters) - Ten people, including six children, have been
killed by Vietnam War era explosives in the
past week, official media reported.
The Lao Dong (Labour) newspaper said a mortar bomb exploded in the central
province of Binh Dinh Monday, killing six
children and injuring four others.
It said the children found the bomb in a field and it exploded when they
started playing with it.
In the southern province of Binh Duong, four people were killed and three
injured when a farmer triggered a land mine last
week, Monday's Vietnam News reported.
The United States and the United Nations have estimated 3.5 million mines
are still buried in battlefields across the country
dating from the 1940s until the 1975 communist victory in the Vietnam War.
Much of the ordnance is a legacy of the massive U.S. involvement in Vietnam
in the 1960s and 1970s.
Dozens of deaths and injuries caused by war-era explosives are reported
every year and many of the victims are children.
The United States announced in June that it would include Vietnam in its
global humanitarian demining program and
provide equipment worth about $1.7 million to help detect and destroy land
mines and unexploded ordnance.
The province worst affected is Quang Tri in the center of the country.
Until 1975 it abutted the demilitarized zone that
separated communist North Vietnam from the capitalist U.S.-backed South and
was fiercely contested.
Mines are also still a serious problem near Vietnam's borders with China
and Laos.
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