Three thousand five hundred bombs abandoned by Japanese troops during World War II have been unearthed from the base of a hill in Dunhua City in northeast China's Jilin Province, police said on Tuesday.

The bombs, weighing more than 40 tons, were found buried in a rectangular pit 15 meters long and two meters wide at the foot of a small hill in Dunhua's Shaheyan Township, which was once the site of a Japanese military airport, police said.

The bombs, potentially the biggest weapon find ever in Jilin, were discovered by three local farmers from Daqiao Township on June 3 using a metal detector to find scrap iron which they hoped to sell for money, police said.

The bombs were in a good state of preservation. Experts from the local bomb disposal center said that if the largest one -- weighing around 35 kg -- were to explode, people and livestock within a radius of at least five km would be in danger.

The bombs have been transported to the center to be destroyed.

Chinese official statistics show Japan abandoned at least two million tons of chemical weapons at about 40 sites in 15 provinces at the end of World War II, mostly in the three northeast provinces of Heilongjiang, Jilin, and Liaoning.

China and Japan joined the United Nations Chemical Weapons Convention in 1997. Two years later, they signed a memorandum obliging Japan to remove all weapons by June 2007 and provide all necessary funds, equipment, and personnel for their retrieval and destruction.

The Japanese government has asked for an extension of the disposal deadline to April 2012.

(Xinhua News Agency June 13, 2007)