'Help' was last word from Fujita 4 / Message received Tuesday was final contact after arrest in China

The Yomiuri Shimbun

Fujita Corp.'s last contact with four employees who were seized by Chinese authorities in Shijiazhuang on Monday was a text message reading "help" in Chinese from one of the men on Tuesday, according to sources.

A senior official of the second-tier general contractor told reporters at a press conference Friday: "We don't know many details...We're hurrying to gather information."

At the start of the press conference, Tatsuro Tsuchiya, a senior operating officer of the firm, said: "We're unable to contact the four men. Other employees and [the men's] families are very worried."

Hiroo Suganuma, general manager of the company's international business division, was also at the press conference. Fujita is based in Shibuya Ward, Tokyo.

According to Tsuchiya, the four men traveled to Hebei Province on Monday to study the possibility of the company winning a construction contract related to a Japanese government-funded project to dispose of chemical weapons abandoned by the Imperial Japanese Army at the end of World War II. The four were scheduled to stay two or three days.

A staff member at Fujita's office in China received a text message via cell phone reading "jiuming," or "help" in Chinese, at 7:16 a.m. Tuesday.

The arms-disposal project was reviewed by the government following a scandal involving Pacific Consultants International--that company's former president and three former executives received suspended prison terms last year for swindling the government out of about 300 million yen by overcharging for work related to the project. The scandal came to light in October 2007 when prosecutors raided Pacific's main office.

However, the project had recently begun to move forward again. On Sept. 1, Hideo Hiraoka, then senior vice minister of the Cabinet Office, declared the disposal of chemical weapons in Nanjing had begun after a mobile detoxification and disposal facility was completed on the outskirts of the city.

Fujita won a contract from the Cabinet Office to build the mobile facility, and worked on the project from December to August.

Shijiazhuang, the city where the four Fujita employees were arrested, has been one of the prime candidates for a similar weapons-disposal facility in northern China during negotiations with the Chinese. Shijiazhuang is the capital of Hebei Province.

An official of the Cabinet Office's Abandoned Chemical Weapons Office said: "We'd hoped to start accepting bids for construction this fiscal year. All we can do now is try to advance the project, but considering the timing of the arrests, I'm worried it might be affected."

Hitotsubashi University Prof. Wang Yunhai, a specialist in Chinese criminal law, said, "If the four aren't found to be spies, then a normal punishment would be to fine or deport them."

"Things change if the authorities judge them to be spies. If the espionage they were involved in is considered to be minor, the punishment would be imprisonment for up to five years. However, if the spy operation is concluded to pose a serious threat to national security, penalties include imprisonment for an indefinite period or the death penalty," Wang said.

Based on the Chemical Weapons Convention, which took effect in 1997 and obligates member states to destroy chemical weapons they abandoned in other nations, Japan decided to pay all costs associated with the project, including excavation, collection and detoxification.

The Imperial Japanese Army is believed to have abandoned about 300,000 to 400,000 chemical-weapon shells in the Haerbaling district in Jilin Province, which is near Hebei Province and is the largest cache of abandoned chemical weapons in China.