A farmer in the eastern China province of Zhejiang has filed a lawsuit against two paper mills whose industrial waste has killed over 10,000 crabs he raised in a local river.

Tan Xiongwei, a villager of Zhouwangmiao Township in Haining city, requested in his lawsuit lodged with the Haining Municipal People's Court 250,000 yuan (US$30,000) in indemnity from two local firms -- Haining Xinhua Paper Pulp Co. and Haining Bangda Paper Mill.

Tan charged that most of the crabs he raised in the Xintang River died for no obvious reason within three weeks towards the end of 2002, and local fishery authorities confirmed the dead crabs involved a direct economic loss of nearly 110,000 yuan (13,250 US dollars).

His losses doubled in January 2003, when his newly-bought crabs continued to die in large numbers. "It's an astronomical amount for a farmer," said Tan.

When aquatic life specialists ruled out the possibility that the crabs had died of diseases or pesticide, the farmer sent samples of the dead crabs to the Zhejiang Provincial Fresh-water Products Institute for testing.

"Experts confirmed the crabs were suffocated to death in polluted water, as masses of particulate matter were found in their gills," said Tan.

He said the pollutants could only have come from the two paper mills, which share one drainage outlet in the Xintang River, whose water was protected by the local fishery authority from industrial waste.

The two companies vowed to drain only consumer wastes into the river, but were witnessed by villagers to have let out industrial waste several times in 2002.

"One witness reported their illegal drainage to the fishery authority on Dec. 4, and fishery officials had recorded with a camcorder how they had polluted the water with industrial waste for quite a long time," said Tan.

A subsequent sampling test by the fishery authority that day also showed the water had been polluted, according to Tan.

Court sources say they are still investigating the case.

(Xinhua News Agency March 2, 2004)