A ship owner was arrested on Friday following a massive spill of concentrated sulfuric acid last August on the Grand Canal, a 900-year-old canal in east China, which forced more than 1,500 residents to evacuate.

Xu Changjun, 41, owner of the cargo ship, will face criminal charges, according to prosecutors.

Xu allegedly used a secondhand cargo ship to carry 220 tons of concentrated sulfuric acid on July 30 this year from Suzhou, east China's Jiangsu Province, to Hangzhou, in neighboring Zhejiang Province, along the Grand Canal.

The ship was damaged after it ran aground on July 27. Xu had it repaired and put it immediately back into operation without obtaining a test certificate from ship administration authorities as required.

In the early hours of Aug. 2, the ship captain saw river water entering the cabin and sulfuric acid started to leak that evening. Ignoring the captain's reports, Xu ordered the ship to continue.

The ship ran aground in the Hangzhou section of the canal in the early hours of Aug. 3. All 220 tons of concentrated sulfuric acid aboard leaked into the river.

The leakage forced over 1,500 residents of Tangxi and Renhe towns to flee their homes because of the dangerous fumes given off by the leaked acid. Fish died by the thousands in the polluted section of the canal, and navigation was suspended for 10 hours.

The local environmental protection authorities poured 900 tons of liquid alkali into the water to dilute the pollution.

The 1,794-km canal, linking Beijing and Hangzhou, still has a 1,000-km navigable section, mainly between Jining City of Shandong Province and Zhejiang. It is the longest artificial river in the world, as well as a key north-south water channel in China.

Completed in 1291, the Grand Canal starts from Tongzhou District of Beijing in the north and runs 1,794 kilometers southward to Hangzhou of east China's Zhejiang Province. The project traverses five major rivers in China -- the Haihe River, the Yellow River, the Huaihe River, the Yangtze River and the Qiantang River -- and six provinces.

(Xinhua News Agency November 18, 2006)