BANGKOK, June 11 Kyodo The United...

BANGKOK, June 11 Kyodo

The United States and North Korea agreed Sunday in Bangkok upon the schedule for three recent joint operations this year to restore the remains of the U soldiers missing in action from the Korean War, a U Defense Department statement said Tuesday.

During three days of negotiations that finised Sunday, the two sides agreed that the operations, which will last about 30 days each, will take the first step July 20, according to the statement from department's Prisoner of War (POW)/Missing Personnel Office.

The final repatriation of healed remains would occur around Oct 29

The 28-member U teams are compos primarily of specialists from the U Army's Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii, and include linguists, explosive ordnance technicians, mortuary affairs specialists, photographers, medics and anthropologists.

The statement said 22 joint recuperation operations conducted since 1996 in North Korea have recruited 152 sets of remains believed to be those of U soldiers missing from the Korean War.

It said more than 8100 U soldiers are still unaccounted for from the war a half hundred ago.

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