Officials said it will take months to determine how many American soldiers are part of the 55 boxes of remains that North Korea released to the United States on Aug. 1.
“It’s going to take months of analysis to get a refined estimate,” John Byrd, director of the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency’s Central Identification Laboratory, said at the White House press briefing on Aug. 14.
“At no time did we expect one body, one box.”
Byrd said the preservation of the remains is characterized as “moderate to poor” and the process will be “very DNA-intensive.”
The remains are processed and entered into a mass database, he said, “where they can be compared to all of the other samples that we’ve generated from remains from North Korea.”
The DNA of remains is also compared to that of possible family members.
“We also look for comparisons to dental records,” Byrd said. “We look for individuals that are unusual in the sense of being very tall, very short, very old—anything that distinguishes somebody, we can usually get a good clue and identify them faster.”
Byrd confirmed that no animal remains were found mixed into the 55 boxes.
Kelly McKeague, director of the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, said he had “high confidence” that the remains contain American soldiers.
“In the early ‘90s, for five years, the North Koreans would repatriate unilaterally remains that they had recovered,” he said. “Out of those 208 boxes over those 5 years, we estimated, after DNA sampling, 400 individuals. From that, 200 were Americans.”
McKeague said, although there may be non-Americans contained in the remains—such as those from South Korean, Chinese, or North Korean soldiers—the laboratories are able to differentiate between them.
He said there are still 7,700 American soldiers unaccounted for from the Korean War.
McKeague said the Department of Defense is talking with the North Korean People’s Army about resuming joint field operations to uncover and repatriate more remains.
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