19 Korean War remains
en route to isles for IDs
SEOUL >> North Korea turned over 19 sets of remains to the U.S. Army yesterday, part of a project to find the thousands of American soldiers who went missing in the Korean War.
The remains, in caskets draped with powder-blue United Nations flag, were loaded into black hearses after a ceremony outside the 8th U.S. Army headquarters in Seoul that included a 21-gun salute and "Taps."
The remains were brought overland across the heavily fortified Demilitarized Zone that has divided rival North and South Korea since the end of the 1950-53 conflict. They will be flown to Hawaii for identification.
U.S. and North Korean teams recovered the remains as part of a joint search project that began in 1996 and has so far recovered more than 180 remains thought to be of U.S. soldiers.
"Most important is that we will be taking missing Americans from the Korean War back to American soil so they are no longer lost in the hills in North Korea," said Lt. Col. Jerry O'Hara, a spokesman for the U.S. military's Hawaii-based Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command's Central Identification Laboratory.
The United States was a key member of the United Nations coalition that helped South Korea repel the North Korean invasion that triggered the Korea War. The fighting ended in a cease-fire, not formal peace treaty, meaning that the two sides are technically still at war.