IOC chief Bach to visit Hiroshima on July 16

TOKYO: International Olympic Committee (IOC) president Thomas Bach will visit Hiroshima on Friday to mark the start of the Olympic Truce, organisers said here on Wednesday.

Bach, who arrived in Tokyo on July 9, will lay a wreath at the cenotaph of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, the location where an atomic bomb was dropped by the United States on August 6, 1945.

The IOC chief will also deliver a speech at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, reports Xinhua.

Seiko Hashimoto, president of the Tokyo 2020 organising committee, will accompany Bach for the visit, during which they will meet atomic bomb survivors.

The United States dropped the first atomic bomb in Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, and the second on Nagasaki three days later, killing about 210,000 people by the end of that year. The nuclear attacks finally brought the end of Japan's brutal and ugly colonisation and invasion of many East Asian countries, and the Second World War. (IANS)

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