Asia's growing chemical industry and links between local terrorist groups and the Al-Qaeda network raise the spectre of a chemical attack in the region, warned experts.

The director for international counter-terrorism in Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Shinsuke Shimizu, told a news briefing at the end of a five-day conference here that such an attack could have "huge consequences".

Shimizu said the 60 chemical weapons experts, security officials and policy makers from 12 countries at the meeting shared the view that "we should not overlook the risk of chemical terrorism".

Countries represented included Japan, China, Canada, the United States and members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.

Delegates had agreed to cooperate on sharing information and expertise to prevent chemical terrorism, he said, noting Japan's experience with a sarin gas attack in the Tokyo subway by a religious cult in 1995 which killed 12 people and made thousands ill.

Easily detectable

Shimizu had earlier told the conference chemical attacks did not require sophisticated dispersal mechanisms and were not easily detectable by traditional security measures.

"Even a college student can produce a small amount of sarin, and this would be enough to mount a terrorist attack," he said.

Terrorism expert Rohan Gunaratna, head of the Singapore-based International Centre for Political Violence and Terrorism Research, addressed the conference on a "Recently Recovered Jemaah Islamiyah Chem-Bio Manual".

Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) is seen as the Southeast Asian wing of Osama bin laden's Al-Qaeda group and has mounted a string of attacks, including the Bali bombings in October 2002 which killed 202 people.

Gunaratna's address to the conference was behind closed doors because of its "sensitive nature", but he told AFP the manual, discovered in the Philippines, described the construction of chemical and biological weapons "in a rudimentary way".

Governments needed to become more alert to the threat and develop standard counter measures. "Hospitals should have antidotes and security forces should be better trained, with specialised units to respond to such an eventuality," he said.

The conference, jointly hosted by the Japanese government and the US-backed Southeast Asia Regional Centre for Counter-Terrorism, was the second in a series announced in 2002 by Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi.

The first was held in Tokyo in September 2003, and further seminars are planned, Shimizu said. - AFP