The UXO pieces were found in an underground pit by MAG staff members onDecember 9. They included mortar shells, grenades and detonators.
TheMAG is registered as a charitable company in the UK. It is a humanitarian andadvocacy organisation that finds, removes and destroys landmines, clustermunitions and unexploded bombs from places affected by conflict.
More than 328,000 tonnes of explosives were usedin Quang Tri town in 1972 during the war against the US. TheMAG’s unexploded ordnance (UXO) clearance project in the province began in 1999.
According to the Ministry of Labour, Invalids andSocial Affairs, Vietnam is one of countries most contaminated with UXOs.
It is estimated that about 800,000 tonnes of UXOswere left across the country after the war ended in 1975, mostly in the centralregion. Some 6.13 million hectares of land are polluted with or suspected ofbeing polluted with UXOs, accounting for 18.82 percent of the country’s totalarea.
Since 1975, UXO incidents have killed more than40,000 people and injured 60,000 others, most of whom were breadwinners oftheir families or children./.