3/8/2011 - JOINT BASE PEARL HARBOR-HICKAM, Hawaii (AFNS) -- Cooperative efforts between the United States and China for accounting of Americans missing from the Korean War broadened last month with the arrival of a specially trained archeological team in Guangdong province.
The group from the U.S. Joint Prisoners of War/Missing in Action Accounting Command arrived in China in mid-February.
Some 19 JPAC recovery team members will search for 12 missing Americans lost as the result of an alleged November 1950 U.S. aircraft crash, officials said.
Recovery teams will search for human remains, life-support items and other material evidence that may further the identification of missing Americans.
JPAC is a jointly manned U.S. Pacific Command organization of more than 400 military and civilian specialists that has investigated and recovered missing U.S. service members since the 1970s.
The United States and China have cooperated during POW/MIA accounting missions in the past, officials said, with both countries recognizing the significance of these humanitarian operations.
(Courtesy of American Forces Press Service)
Comments
3/26/2011 1:37:33 PM ET Although it is gratifying that Beijing is cooperating with the US on MIA recovery operations on their own territory Beijing is actively opposing MIA recovery operations on foreign territory adjoining China. In northeast India where hundreds of American aviators were lost during World War II recovery operations were started there in 2008 by the Bush Administration but were canceled by the Obama Administration in 2010 and 2011. Many experts believe that the Obama Administration acting in concert with New Delhi yielded to Chinese pressure to cancel the operations. Beijing claims the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh where many of those aviators were lost as its own territory and had publicly demanded on China Radio International that MIA recovery operations not be allowed there because it considered them to be provocative. Gary Zaetz, Spokesman for the families of 8 American airmen lost in Arunachal Pradesh India in 1944.
