Dozens of boxes containing what’s left of American soldiers who died in the Korean war will be sent to a lab in Hawaii to confirm who they were
The US military remains released by North Korea on Friday will be sent to a military lab in Hawaii, where they’ll enter a system that routinely identifies service members from decades-old conflicts.
Identifications depend on combining multiple lines of evidence, and they can take time: Some cases are not resolved for decades.
Dog tags found with the remains can help, and even scraps of clothing can be traced to the material used in uniforms. Teeth can be matched with dental records and bones can be used to estimate height. The distinctive shape of a clavicle bone can be matched to records of X-rays taken decades ago to look for tuberculosis, said Charles Prichard, a spokesman for the Defence POW/MIA Accounting Agency.
If DNA analysis is called for, samples are sent to a lab at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware.
Tiny samples of bone or teeth, no bigger than the amount of bone in the last joint of the little finger, are enough to yield usable DNA, said Timothy McMahon, who oversees the Dover lab as director of Defence Department DNA Operations.
Each sample is sanded to remove surface contamination, ground to the consistency of baby powder, and then treated with a substance that dissolves the bone and leaves the DNA for analysis. That DNA is then compared with genetic samples from living people who are related to the missing.
The military has been collecting DNA from such family members since 1992, and has reached the relatives of 92 per cent of the 8,100 service members who were listed as missing at the end of the Korean war, McMahon said.
