http://snipurl.com/41psHORTEN, Norway (Reuters) - Six decades after the defeat of Nazi Germany, Adolf Hitler's chemical weapons are coming back to haunt Europe as they ooze from rusting and poorly mapped graves on the seabed.
Far from the hunt for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, corrosion, deeper fishing by trawlers and seabed cables or oil pipelines are disturbing stockpiles in what once seemed inaccessible dumps from the Baltic to the Atlantic.
"It was terrifying. The pain was unbearable and my hands blistered all over," said Danish fisherman Walther Holm Thorsen, who was 15 when he threw a cracked grey canister back into the Baltic Sea after it was snared in the net of his trawler.
One of the first postwar victims of the Nazis in the 1969 accident, he said the pain came in the middle of the night, hours after he and another crew member had rinsed the oily substance off the fish. They had no idea it was mustard gas.
Thorsen spent three months in hospital, and his hands are badly scarred despite skin grafts. "Working as a fisherman now is hard -- my hands often feel like they're freezing," he said.
He said that trawler crew are now more aware of the dangers from chemical arms and have decontamination gear aboard. "But increasing rust will be a problem in future," he added.
In some parts of Europe, no one even knows where tens of thousands of tonnes of munitions are.
Ole-Kristian Bjerkemo of the Norwegian coastguard said he hoped a new seismic survey would be carried out this year to locate ships loaded with Nazi stocks of mustard gas and the nerve agent tabun which were scuttled off Norway in 1945.
Vervelend nieuws, het schijnt dus dat schepen met mosterd gas aan het lekker gaan
