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| Sunday, 29 September 2002 |
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China returns remains of WW2 pilots to US -report BEIJING, Sept 28 (Reuters) - China has handed over to a visiting U.S. army team what could be the remains of up to four American pilots who went missing in action during World War Two, the Xinhua news agency said. The remains, turned over at a ceremony in the Tibetan capital Lhasa, were believed to belong to U.S. pilots who were transporting goods between southwest China and India during the war, Xinhua said in a report late on Friday. The U.S. delegation was returning to Beijing and would hold a news conference on Monday, an embassy spokesman said on Saturday. He gave no further details. Xinhua said the remains were discovered in Tibet's Mainling county and would be taken back to the United States for identification. The team from the U.S. Army Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii arrived in August to search for the site of a C-46 plane which crashed carrying four people en route from the southwestern city of Kunming to its base in India in March 1944, the embassy said last month. They also would search for a second C-46 crash site but it was unclear which flight that was or how many people were on board, it said in a statement. The planes were believed to have crashed during the U.S.-organised airlift from India to China over the southern spur of the Himalayas, which became known as "the Hump", when Washington and Beijing were war allies. The team included 14 specialists in forensic anthropology, logistics, photography, medicine and mortuary affairs, as well as two U.S. embassy personnel, the embassy has said. Remains of U.S. pilots have been discovered by local villagers in Tibet several times since the 1980s, Xinhua said. In July, China allowed U.S. army investigators to launch the first search for American personnel who went missing in the country during the Cold War. That team said in late July they might have found the crash site of a CIA plane shot down over northeastern China in 1952, but did not find the remains of two pilots who died in the crash. |
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