News-Info-Alerts

Re: Japanese POW Remains Returned After 5 Decades

To: ALL

From: Andi Wolos & Bob Necci

(POW-MIA InterNetwork)

Date: August 09, 2002

"Remains of Japanese POWs repatriated from Russia

AP - MOSCOW - The remains of 342 Japanese prisoners who died in captivity in Siberia after the second world war were sent to Japan from the Russian city of Irkutsk, the Interfax news agency reported.


Citing an unidentified official in the regional administration, Interfax said a team from Japan has been exhuming remains from a mass grave in the village of Kvitok this summer.

An estimated 600,000 Japanese soldiers were held in the Soviet Union, most of them captured by the Red Army in Japanese-occupied northeast China after World War II ended.

About 60,000 of the POWs died in harsh conditions at labor camps in the Soviet Union, mostly in Siberia. Irkutsk is 4,200 kilometers (2,600 miles) east of Moscow.

The whereabouts of many of the bodies are unknown, but about 2,000 sets of remains have been returned since Russia and Japan began working together for to find them about 10 years ago, Interfax reported.

Russia and Japan have yet to sign a post-World War II peace treaty due to a territorial dispute over four tiny islands that Soviet troops seized at the end of the war. "