News-Info-Alerts

To: ALL

From: Andi Wolos & Bob Necci

(POW-MIA InterNetwork)

Re: War Remain Discovered

Date: August 29, 2000

Searchers recover human war remains in Vietnam

HANOI, Aug 29 (Reuters) - Teams searching for Americans posted as missing in action (MIA) in the Vietnam War have recovered remains believed to be those of US servicemen from five Vietnamese provinces, the US MIA office said on Tuesday.

The remains were handed over to US charge d'Affaires in Hanoi, Dennis Harter, on Monday, official Vietnamese media reports said.

Gary Flanagan, casualty resolution supervisor at the US MIA office in Hanoi, said the remains had been discovered during searches in five provinces, but he said he did not know how many individuals they represented.

Most were from aircraft crash sites dating back to the years 1965-1972. Flanagan said more than a dozen US servicemen were lost at the crash sites investigated.

The remains will be flown to a US military laboratory in Hawaii for identification. The official Vietnam News Agency said the remains had already undergone primary forensic testing by US and Vietnamese specialists.

A total of 2,006 Americans remain unaccounted for from the US involvement in Indochina until 1975, 1,512 of them in Vietnam. Since the end of the war, 577 US servicemen have been accounted for, 410 of whom went missing in Vietnam.

Vietnam's assistance in accounting for US war missing helped bring about the normalization of diplomatic ties between the two countries five years ago.

Earlier this month, Robert Jones, US deputy assistant secretary of state for prisoner of war/missing personnel affairs, said Washington remained committed to a full accounting for its missing and that position would not alter with the upcoming US administration change.

He said investigation of ``live sighting'' reports remained the highest priority for Washington, even though none of the 21,000 reports since 1973 had led to recovery of a live serviceman.

He said the United States would like Vietnam to do more unilateral search and recovery work, particularly in cases in which soldiers were last known by their comrades to have been alive.

Vietnam has long denied holding any live US prisoners.

Hanoi estimates its war missing at about 300,000 and has called for more US help to account for them.