OMAHA, Neb. (AP) - Seventy U.S. soldiers who died in the Korean War have been identified out of a group of remains North Korean authorities released in 2018.
The identifications were made with DNA by experts at a lab at Nebraska’s Offutt Air Force Base and another one in Hawaii. The effort is part of the U.S. Defense Department’s POW/MIA Accounting Agency’s Korea Project that is cataloging and identifying bones from the Korean War and returning them to families.
Experts believe the 55 cases North Korea released in 2018 contained remains from at least 250 people, the Omaha World-Herald reported. About 170 of those are Americans while the rest are from other countries.
Most of those remains are from the brutal Chosin Reservoir battle that took place in frigid weather over two weeks in late 1950. The United Nations force involved in the battle lost 8,500 during the battle and another 7,500 to frostbite.
Forensic anthropologist Jennie Jin, who is overseeing the effort to identify remains, said a significant amount of work still needs to be done to identify all the remains. And in some cases, scientists have difficulty obtaining DNA from a sample.
At the end of the war, more than 8,300 Americans were unaccounted for. That number has been reduced to about 7,500 through various efforts to identify remains over the years.
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