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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Wednesday, July 02, 2003

DPRK Agrees to Resume MIA Talks with U.S.

The DPRK said Wednesday it is willing to resume talks with the United States on the joint accounting of missing U.S. servicemen from the 1950-1953 Korean War.


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The DPRK said Wednesday it is willing to resume talks with the United States on the joint accounting of missing U.S. servicemen from the 1950-1953 Korean War.

The official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), monitored in Beijing, quoted a spokesman for the DPRK's representative office at the truce village of Panmunjom in the Demilitarized Zone between the two Koreas as saying the decision was taken for humanitarian reasons.

The talks have not been held since DPRK-U.S. relations plummeted last October after Washington said Pyongyang had admitted to pursuing a covert program to enrich uranium for use in nuclear weapons and then cut off fuel supplies to DPRK, prompting a series of retaliatory moves, including the DPRK's withdrawal from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Of the 88,000 U.S. military personnel missing in action from all conflicts, more than 8,100 are from the Korean War.

Twenty-five individual joint operations have been conducted since 1996 in the DPRK, during which remains believed to be those of at least 178 U.S. soldiers have been recovered.

The U.S. Defense Department's Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Office negotiated terms with the DPRK in June 2002 that led to holding of three recovery operations last year.

The U.S. has sought information on the reported sightings of alleged Americans currently living in the DPRK, access to military archives to recover DPRK data about Americans held as prisoners of war during the war and establishing a schedule for resuming joint excavations to recover American remains buried in the DPRK cemeteries and at specific loss sites.

Source: Agencies








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