Remains of U.S. soldiers returned

JAYAPURA, Irian Jaya: The chief of staff of the Trikora Regional Military Command, Brig. Gen. Idris Gassing, handed over to U.S. authorities the remains of eight American airmen killed in what was then Dutch New Guinea during World War II.

Also handed over was wreckage of the crew's downed B-25 bomber. The formal handover ceremony took place at the General MacArthur Monument at Ifar Gunung in Jayapura.

Dutch New Guinea became part of Indonesia in 1963 and the jungled mountainside crash site is now in Indonesia.

Maj. Gen. Amir Sembiring, the chief of the military command overseeing Irian Jaya and Maluku, who was to have officially handed over the remains and wreckage to Major General Thomas C. Waskouw, commander of the U.S. 13th Air Force based in Guam, could not attend the ceremony.

Sembiring had to leave for Ambon, Maluku, following rioting there.

A U.S. embassy official at the ceremony said the remains would be repatriated to the United States and handed over to surviving family members.

The B-25 was last heard from on Sept. 8, 1945, when it took off from Merauke but it never arrived at its destination of Biak.

Remains of the plane were found in December 1995 by a team of the PT Freeport Exploration Division in their flight from Bilogai village to Timika. They spotted the wreckage at 12.500 feet on the slopes of a mountain range.

In early 1999, the United States government sent a team of ten from the U.S. Army Central Identification Laboratory, Hawaii (CILHI) to recover the remains of the eight Americans.

Meanwhile, a spokesman of local administration, FX Suryanto said the plane actually was carrying 20 American topography experts.

The plane was not armed because it was on a research mission.