By Yi Whan-woo
The government is looking into allegations that North Korean soldiers who died during the 1950-53 Korean War were mistakenly classified as Chinese soldiers and their remains sent to China.
The Ministry of Defense said Tuesday that it is possible that an unknown number of North Koreans were included among 505 Chinese war dead whose remains have been returned to China for reburial since March 2014.
If the allegations turn out to be true, that could cause trouble in the Sino-South Korean relations that are currently booming.
“Some of our officials raised suspicions that there may have been a mistake in classifying excavated remains of soldiers killed during the war,” ministry spokesman Kim Min-seok said.
“At the moment, we don’t know if the remains of North Koreans were sent to China or not. We’ll find out how this happened if that is the case.”
He added Defense Minister Han Min-koo has approved the investigation.
The defense ministry has led the exhumation project after President Park Geun-hye offered to repatriate the remains of fallen Chinese soldiers to their homeland during a summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2013.
South Korea sent back the remains of 437 soldiers in March 2014 and another 68 this March for reburial in a Chinese national cemetery in Shenyang, Liaoning Province.
The government had underscored that all remains belonged to Chinese soldiers, despite repeated suspicions that it failed to identify those remains in a scientific manner and instead randomly sorted them out.
In a parliamentary audit in October, Rep. Kwon Eun-hee of the main opposition New Politics Alliance for Democracy claimed the military officials did not compare the DNA extracted from the bones of the war dead with their surviving family members in China.
Kim acknowledged that such a comparison was impossible, saying “the cemetery in Paju has been poorly managed.”
“I heard some body parts of a fallen soldier were buried with other remains of war casualties in the same casket,” he said.
“Under such circumstance, our officials depended on the belongings of dead soldiers to identify their nationality, not their DNA.”
It has been rumored that the defense ministry mobilized low ranking soldiers to exhume the disputed remains despite not having any related experience.
The Chinese government did not make any announcements over the dispute involving the remains.
Most of the remains had been recovered from frontline areas in Gangwon Province where fierce battles took place between U.N. and Chinese forces during the three-year conflict.
China fought alongside North Korea in the war, contributing around 1.35 million troops, more than five times the number of North Korean combatants. Historical records show that around 150,000 Chinese soldiers died in the three-year conflict.