Remains of U.S. soldiers returned

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.