ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, May 11, 1996 TAG: 9605130062
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-10 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: WASHINGTON
SOURCE: Associated Press
Remains of as many as 4,000 of the more than 8,100 U.S. servicemen unaccounted for from the Korean War could be recovered in field searches that may begin in North Korea before year's end, a Pentagon official said Friday.
Alan Liotta, deputy director of the Pentagon's Defense POW-MIA Office, said U.S. officials had not yet decided which sites in North Korea to propose searching first. The Pentagon knows the exact map coordinates of many aircraft shootdown sites, U.N. graves and prisoner-of-war burial sites in North Korea.
Asked how many sets of remains might be found, Liotta said the best guess was 3,000 to 4,000.
``Some are in mass graves where we would have a potential for a large number of recoveries, and some are more isolated graves,'' Liotta told reporters.
Liotta spoke at a press conference one day after he and other U.S. officials reached a breakthrough agreement with North Korea on the war remains issue.
The United States agreed to pay North Korea $2 million for costs associated with the communist nation's unilateral return of 162 sets of remains in 1993-94, and the two sides agreed to discuss joint search missions for other remains.
U.S. officials said they expect the searches to begin before the end of this year. Liotta said talks would be held in early June to discuss the arrangements.
Although the official total of servicemen unaccounted for from the 1950-53 Korean War is more than 8,100, thousands are unrecoverable. More than 800 of the 8,100, for example, are buried in Hawaii; they were returned by North Korea shortly after the war but could not be positively identified. Many others listed as unaccounted for were lost at sea or blown apart on the battlefield.
Even a number of the many hundreds buried at known POW camps along the Yalu River were probably washed away and will never be found, officials believe.
North Korean officials recently had insisted there be no joint recovery operations on their soil until the United States agreed to negotiations - excluding South Korea - on a peace treaty to replace the military armistice that ended the fighting in July 1953. The United States insists the treaty talks include South Korea.
Liotta said the North Korean delegation never mentioned a link between the remains issue and the peace talks.
A POW-MIA advocacy group, the National Alliance of Families for the Return of America's Missing Servicemen, issued a statement Friday welcoming the agreement.
``However, we question the reluctance of the U.S. government and its negotiators to bring up the question of America's servicemen left behind'' alive at the war's end, said Delores Alfond, the group's national chairman.
LENGTH: Medium: 58 linesby CNB