US Receives Soldiers Remains --- Coalition of Families

Forwarded by the Coalition of Families:

US Receives Soldiers Remains
The Associated Press
By ROBERT BURNS

WASHINGTON (AP) - Remains believed to be those of four American servicemen killed in the Korean War were flown to an Army laboratory in Hawaii on Monday after being released to US officials in North Korea. The remains will be studied at the Central Identification Laboratory at Hickam Air Force Base in hopes of confirming their identities, possibly through the use of mitochondrial DNA, the Pentagon announced. In a brief repatriation ceremony at the airport in Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, the four sets of remains were handed over to a US delegation led by Robert L. Jones, deputy assistant secretary of defense for POW-MIA affairs. They were flown to Yokota Air Base, Japan, and then to Hawaii. The repatriation had been delayed for months by North Korea's insistence that instead of handing over the remains in the Demilitarized Zone that separates north and south Korea in the presence of United Nations Command personnel, the exchange be done in Pyongyang as a strictly U.S.-North Korean event. US officials earlier this month agreed to that demand in order to get the remains back.

About 8,200 US servicemen are still listed as missing from the 1950-53 Korean War. In the past three years, the United States has recovered the remains believed to be those of 39 Americans. Of those, three have been positively identified and returned to their families for US burial. A US recovery team is currently in North Korea searching for more remains. The four sets of remains turned over in Pyongyang on Monday were recovered during a joint U.S.-North Korean excavation earlier this year. The Pentagon believes the four soldiers were killed in late November or early December 1950 in battles at the Chongchon River in North Korea, where the American 8th Army suffered the brunt of China's initial entry into the war and lost hundreds of men.

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