Vietnam war death toll rises

MORE than 100,000 Vietnamese have been killed or injured by land mines or other abandoned explosives since the Vietnam War ended nearly 40 years ago, and clearing all of the country will take decades more, officials said.

“The war’s painful legacy, which includes hundreds of thousands of tonnes of bombs and unexploded ordnance, continues to cause painful casualties every day,” Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung told a UN-sponsored conference on ways to deal with the problem.

Dung said 42,132 people have been killed and 62,163 others wounded by land mines, bombs and other explosives since the war ended in 1975.