BEIJING, Aug. 11 (Xinhua) -- According to a Japanese war criminal's confession published Monday, Chinese citizens were sent to the notorious germ warfare base Unit 731.

Masao Horiguchi, born in 1901, came to northeast China in 1937, as a colonel and commander of Jinzhou Military Police. Of 80 people he arrested from August 1942 to August 1943, about 20 were sent to Unit 731 in northeast China's Harbin City, according to his confession. Another three Chinese patriots were also sent to the unit in 1939 after being tortured.

Unit 731 was established in Harbin in the 1930s as the WWII center of Japan's biological warfare research in China and Southeast Asia. More than 10,000 people were killed there.

The confession is the latest in a series published on the website of China's State Archives Administration (SAA) following denials of war crimes by Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Japanese right-wing politicians.

This is the latest of a total of 45 Japanese war criminal confessions the SAA plans to publish. The SAA has been issuing one a day since July 3.