China owns up to marine incursion

China owns up to marine incursion

JAPAN: Beijing admitted on Tuesday that a Chinese nuclear submarine entered Japanese territorial waters last week, announced the foreign ministry.

Japanese Foreign Minister Nobutaka Machimura said that the Chinese government admitted the submarine belonged to Beijing and expressed regret over the intrusion into Japanese waters.

Machimura said Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Wu Dawei conveyed the regret to the Japanese ambassador to China, Koreshige Anami, on Tuesday morning.

A U.S. 7th Fleet submarine was the first to detect the Chinese submarine in the Pacific after a U.S. military satellite detected a Chinese Han-class sub departing from a Chinese port.

The U.S. navy then informed Japan, which dispatched Maritime Self-Defense Force patrol planes and dropped sonars to confirm the vessel's location in waters south of Ishigaki island in the southern prefecture of Okinawa early on Nov. 9, the report said.

Japan believes the sub was Han-class, China's first nuclear submarine launched into service in the 1980s.

The submarine entered between Ishigaki and Miyako islands in Okinawa at around 5:50 a.m. last Wednesday, traveling inside Japanese territorial waters for about two hours without surfacing, as required by international law. --DPA