Ahead of a planned visit by US President Barack Obama to the City of Hiroshima, Japan's Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida said Tuesday that the US atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were "extremely regrettable."

Kishida, whose lower house constituency is in Hiroshima, also said that the action of the US against the two A-bombed cities ran contrary to the basic understanding of humanitarianism as regards international law, Xinhua reported.

While Obama is expected to pay a courtesy visit to Hiroshima this Friday as the President will be in Japan from a day earlier for the two-day Group of Seven leaders' summit to be held in Mie Prefecture, central Japan, marking the first such visit to one of the A-bombed cities by a sitting U.S. President, Obama is not expected to deliver an official apology.

Calls from survivors, known here locally as "hibakusha" and their relatives, as well as from relatives of the hundreds of thousands who died in the wake of the atomic bombings, for Obama to issue and official apology have been rampant.

Source ; MENA