Author Gordon Chang said Friday that until DNA and other tests were completed, the U.S. will not know whether the remains returned by North Korea were of American soldiers who died in the Korean War.
"These could be British soldiers," Chang, an Asian affairs expert and columnist for The Daily Beast, told Brooke Baldwin on CNN. "The British fought alongside us in the Korean War.
"Presumably, the North Koreans would return remains that they thought were westerners," he added. "Until that analysis is done, we certainly don't know."
Pyongyang returned the remains Friday as part of an agreement reached last month between President Donald Trump and dictator Kim Jong Un at their summit in Singapore.
The repatriation of remains of U.S. soldiers missing in the conflict, which lasted from 1950 to 1953, was seen as a diplomatic coup for Trump from the summit.
However, the Defense Department reports that more than 7,800 men remain lost and unrecovered from the Korean War — with about 5,300 disappearing in North Korea alone.
Chang told Baldwin that many of those missing "should be characterized as POWs."
"We have incontrovertible evidence that Americans were captured," he said. "We have no indication of death.
"Although they're quite old, nonetheless, they should not be MIAs — and we should be talking with North Korea, China and Russia about these people.
"We know that they were taken to those various locations."
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