TIRANA, Albania (AP) — It was Sgt. John Thompson's ring that enabled searchers to locate his remains and those of six other British military personnel from a plane that crashed in Albania during World War II.

An official funeral ceremony was held Wednesday in the Albanian capital of Tirana to bury the remains of seven U.K. military at Tirana Park Memorial Cemetery.

A Halifax JP244 plane supplying the British mission in Albania, which was fighting alongside Albanian partisan forces, crashed in a mountainside in Biza on Oct. 29, 1944.

In 1960, resident Jaho Cala found Thompson's finger with the ring and hid it, afraid to show it to Albania's then-communist officials. Upon the fall of the communist regime in 1990, his son contacted the U.S. and British embassies, leading to the finding of the remains in 2015.