MANILA – Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte said on Friday he was not sure why China’s commerce minister had cancelled a trip to his country, and that Beijing misunderstood his foreign minister’s comments about its militarisation in the South China Sea.

In a speech in which he expressed his intention to have solid ties with China, Duterte said there was no need to press it to abide by an international arbitration ruling last year.

Foreign Secretary Perfecto Yasay, as chair of a meeting of Southeast Asian leaders, said on Tuesday said the region had “grave concerns” about Chinese weapons installations on manmade islands in the South China Sea.

“I would like to assure China, and this is what I had committed to do when I was there, that we will talk as friends,” he said, referring to a trip he made to China last year.

He also said his country, despite its longstanding alliance with the United States, was “not duty-bound to follow” its foreign policy.

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SEOUL – North Korea has up to 5,000 tonnes of chemical weapons, South Korean experts said Friday (Feb 24), including the toxin used to assassinate its leader’s half-brother.

Traces of VX – a nerve agent listed as a weapon of mass destruction by the United Nations – were detected on swabs from the face and eyes of Kim Jong Nam, who was poisoned at Kuala Lumpur’s international airport last week, Malaysian police said Friday.

Malaysian detectives are holding three people – women from Indonesia and Vietnam, and a North Korean man – but want to speak to seven others, four of whom are believed to have fled to Pyongyang.

South Korea’s defence ministry said in its 2014 Defence White Paper that the North began producing chemical weapons in the 1980s and estimated that it has about 2,500 to 5,000 tonnes in stock.

North Korea has chemical weapons production facilities in eight locations including the northeastern port of Chongjin and the northwestern city of Sinuiju, it said in the 2012 edition of the document.

“North Korea is believed to have a large stockpile of VX, which can easily be manufactured at low cost,” defence analyst Lee Il Woo at the private Korea Defence Network told AFP.

Developed some 100 years ago, VX can be produced at small laboratories or facilities producing pesticides, he said.

“Chemical and biological weapons can be delivered through various means such as artillery, missiles and planes”, he added.

Read Also: Kim Jong Nam’s death: Doctors say no sign of heart attack or puncture marks

If absorbed through the skin, eyes or nose, just a tiny drop of the colourless, odourless nerve agent is enough to fatally damage a victim’s central nervous system.

Military science professor Kim Jong-Ha at Hannam University said the North has 16 kinds of nerve agents including VX and sarin, used by a Japanese doomsday cult, Aum Shinrikyo, in the 1995 attack on the Tokyo subway system that killed 12 people.

It also possesses other lethal chemicals, including suffocating, blistering and blood agents, Kim said, as well as 13 types of biological weapons such as anthrax and bubonic plague.

Defence analyst Joseph S. Bermudez Jr. has said that North Korea “produces and possesses the capability to effectively employ throughout the Korean peninsula, significant quantities and varieties of chemical weapons”, and could have as many as 150 chemical weapons warheads for ballistic missiles.

Read Also: Kim Jong Nam’s death: It couldn’t have been poison, says North Korea

“It also has, to a lesser extent, the ability to employ these weapons worldwide using unconventional methods of delivery,” he wrote on the closely-watched US-Korea Institute’s website 38North in 2013.

There was a “growing body of evidence” that the North had an “ominous” history of proliferating chemical weapons capabilities to countries such as Syria and Iran, he added.

North Korea has not signed a global chemical weapons convention that prohibits the production, stockpiling and use of chemical weapons.

More than 160 countries signed the treaty, that went into force in 1997.

In a 2015 assessment, the Washington-based Nuclear Threat Initiative wrote: “North Korea claims that it does not possess chemical weapons.”While assessing stockpiles and capabilities are difficult, the DPRK is thought to be among the world’s largest possessors of chemical weapons, ranking third after the United States and Russia.”

A man will stand trial over the brutal stabbing deaths of 19 people at a disability centre in Japan last year – the nation’s bloodiest crime in decades – media reported Friday (Feb 24).

Satoshi Uematsu claimed he was on a self-styled mission to rid the world of people with mental illness when he allegedly carried out the attack at the Tsukui Yamayuri-en (Tsukui Lily Garden) care centre south of Tokyo on July 26.

The mass killing at the facility in mountainous Sagamihara city in Kanagawa prefecture shocked Japan and sparked a review of the country’s mental health system.

Read also: Japan’s frustrated youth a ticking crime bomb

The Yokohama District Public Prosecutors Office indicted Uematsu for killing 19 residents and attempting to kill or injure 24 others at the centre, according to public broadcaster NHK and other media.

Uematsu, who once worked at the facility, had previously been under psychiatric care and had made public threats against the centre.

Read also: Japan knife attacker grins before cameras

The 27-year-old experienced a “personality disorder” but psychological reviews have suggested he is fit for trial, media including Jiji Press said, citing unnamed investigators.

The prosecutors’ office declined to immediately comment when reached by AFP.

Read also: Japan mass killing suspect ‘suddenly changed’ in Feb

Uematsu allegedly broke into the centre, tied up caregivers and roamed the facility stabbing sleeping residents and leaving them in pools of blood, authorities have said.

Shortly afterwards Uematsu turned himself in to local police and confessed, investigators have said.

Uematsu was forcibly hospitalised in February 2016 after telling colleagues at the care centre that he intended to kill disabled people.

He had previously delivered a letter to the speaker of the Lower House of Japan’s parliament in which he outlined a plan for night-time attacks against Tsukui Yamayuri-en and another facility.

He presented a vision of a society in which the seriously handicapped could be euthanised with the approval of family members.

North Korea has up to 5,000 tonnes of chemical weapons, South Korean experts said Friday (Feb 24), including the toxin used to assassinate its leader’s half-brother.

Traces of VX – a nerve agent listed as a weapon of mass destruction by the United Nations – were detected on swabs from the face and eyes of Kim Jong Nam, who was poisoned at Kuala Lumpur’s international airport last week, Malaysian police said Friday.

Malaysian detectives are holding three people – women from Indonesia and Vietnam, and a North Korean man – but want to speak to seven others, four of whom are believed to have fled to Pyongyang.

South Korea’s defence ministry said in its 2014 Defence White Paper that the North began producing chemical weapons in the 1980s and estimated that it has about 2,500 to 5,000 tonnes in stock.

North Korea has chemical weapons production facilities in eight locations including the northeastern port of Chongjin and the northwestern city of Sinuiju, it said in the 2012 edition of the document.”North Korea is believed to have a large stockpile of VX, which can easily be manufactured at low cost,” defence analyst Lee Il Woo at the private Korea Defence Network told AFP.

Read also: This is how North Korean assassins get their targets

Developed some 100 years ago, VX can be produced at small laboratories or facilities producing pesticides, he said.”Chemical and biological weapons can be delivered through various means such as artillery, missiles and planes”, he added.

If absorbed through the skin, eyes or nose, just a tiny drop of the colourless, odourless nerve agent is enough to fatally damage a victim’s central nervous system.

Military science professor Kim Jong-Ha at Hannam University said the North has 16 kinds of nerve agents including VX and sarin, used by a Japanese doomsday cult, Aum Shinrikyo, in the 1995 attack on the Tokyo subway system that killed 12 people.

It also possesses other lethal chemicals, including suffocating, blistering and blood agents, Kim said, as well as 13 types of biological weapons such as anthrax and bubonic plague.

Defence analyst Joseph S. Bermudez Jr. has said that North Korea “produces and possesses the capability to effectively employ throughout the Korean peninsula, significant quantities and varieties of chemical weapons”, and could have as many as 150 chemical weapons warheads for ballistic missiles.”It also has, to a lesser extent, the ability to employ these weapons worldwide using unconventional methods of delivery,” he wrote on the closely-watched US-Korea Institute’s website 38North in 2013.

There was a “growing body of evidence” that the North had an “ominous” history of proliferating chemical weapons capabilities to countries such as Syria and Iran, he added.

North Korea has not signed a global chemical weapons convention that prohibits the production, stockpiling and use of chemical weapons.

More than 160 countries signed the treaty, that went into force in 1997.

In a 2015 assessment, the Washington-based Nuclear Threat Initiative wrote: “North Korea claims that it does not possess chemical weapons.”While assessing stockpiles and capabilities are difficult, the DPRK is thought to be among the world’s largest possessors of chemical weapons, ranking third after the United States and Russia.”

The highest-profile critic of Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s brutal drug war was arrested Friday on charges she said were meant to silence her, but she vowed to keep fighting the “sociopathic serial killer”.

Speaking to journalists minutes before armed police in flak jackets detained her, Senator Leila de Lima insisted she was innocent of the drug trafficking charges that could see her jailed for life.

“It is my honour to be imprisoned for the things I am fighting for. Please pray for me,” De Lima, 57, said outside her Senate office where she had sought temporary refuge overnight after an arrest warrant was issued on Thursday.

“They will not be able to silence me and stop me from fighting for the truth and justice and against the daily killings and repression by the Duterte regime.” De Lima also recorded a polemical video just before her arrest in which she called for Filipinos to show courage and oppose Duterte’s drug war, which has seen more than 6,500 people killed since he took office eight months ago.

“There is no doubt that our president is a murderer and a sociopathic serial killer,” she said in the 10-minute video that was posted on her Facebook page.

Read also: Duterte threatens to kill rights activists if drug problem worsens

De Lima, a former human rights commissioner, said her arrest was an act of revenge for her decade-long efforts to expose Duterte as the leader of death squads during his time as mayor of southern Davao city.

Duterte first raised allegations in August that De Lima had been running a drug trafficking ring with criminals inside the nation’s biggest prison when she was the justice secretary in the previous government.

“I will have to destroy her in public,” Duterte said then as he began a campaign to tarnish her reputation, including by making unsubstantiated allegations about her sex life.

“De Lima is not only screwing her driver, she is also screwing the nation.” The senator was last week charged with three counts of drug trafficking, and the arrest warrant was issued on Thursday.

Read also: Top Chinese official to meet Philippines’ Duterte

De Lima was taken Friday to a special detention centre for high-profile prisoners at the national police headquarters. The detainees’ rooms are spartan, but are comfortable compared with the nation’s notoriously crowded jails.

De Lima and her supporters insisted that Duterte orchestrated the charges not just to crush her opposition, but also to intimidate anyone else who may want to speak out against the president or his drug war.

“People are afraid,” Father Robert Reyes, an activist priest who spent the night at the Senate with De Lima and other supporters, told AFP after her arrest.

“If the government can arrest a powerful person like her, what chance does the little man have? That is the implied message of her arrest.” Vice President Leni Robredo, a member of De Lima’s opposition Liberal Party and elected separately from Duterte, described the arrest as “political harassment”.

Amnesty International said Thursday that it would regard De Lima as a prisoner of conscience.

“The arrest of De Lima is a blatant attempt by the Philippine government to silence criticism of President Duterte and divert attention away from serious human rights violations in the ‘war on drugs’,” it said.

Duterte’s aides insisted they had a strong case against De Lima and said her arrest showed even the most powerful people would be brought to justice if they broke the law.

“The war on illegal drugs targets all who are involved and the arrest of an incumbent senator demonstrates the president’s strong resolve to fight pushers, peddlers and their protectors,” presidential spokesman Ernesto Abella said.

Duterte, 71, won the presidential election last year after promising during the campaign to eradicate drugs in society by killing tens of thousands of people.

He launched the crackdown immediately after taking office in June and police have reported killing 2,555 drug suspects since then, with about 4,000 other people murdered in unexplained circumstances.

Amnesty has warned that police actions in the drug war may amount to crimes against humanity.

Duterte has repeatedly urged police to kill drug addicts as well as traffickers. But his aides insist he has never broken any laws.

An Indonesian passenger plane carrying 192 people from China to Bali was forced to turn back after the crew realised one of its doors was not properly closed, the airline said Friday.

It was the latest problem to hit an airline from Indonesia, which relies heavily on air transport to connect its thousands of islands but has a poor safety record and has suffered several fatal crashes in recent years.

The Boeing 737 operated by Sriwijaya Air was 1.5 hours into the five-hour flight Thursday when its system detected that a passenger door at the front of the aircraft had not shut properly, said spokesman Agus Soedjono.

“The system did not detect this prior to the flight, but when the plane was up in the air, it was detected,” he told AFP.

Read also: SIA plane catches fire at Changi: Passengers told to remain seated

The plane returned to the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou, where it had set out from, and was checked for 30 minutes before taking off again for Denpasar, the capital of the resort island of Bali.

The plane was carrying 180 passengers and 12 crew but after it was forced to turn back, about 20 passengers decided not to continue when the aircraft set off again for Bali, he said.

No one was hurt or injured in the incident.

Sriwijaya flies to Indonesian destinations and a handful of international destinations.

It has suffered three accidents since 2008 that caused substantial damage to the aircraft involved, according to the Aviation Safety Network, which monitors plane accidents.