80 years on, remains of 3 US airmen who went missing during WWII identified

It was the summer of 1944, during World War-II. A B-29 Superfortress airplane, part of US armed forces' 444th Bombardment Group (very heavy), was returning to its base after a bombing raid on the Imperial Iron and Steel Works at Yawata, Kyushu Island, in Japan. The airplane crashed in the rice fields of Sapekhati, today's Assam, killing all 11 crew members aboard. US teams visited the site after the war, but could recover remains of only seven soldiers. Eighty years later, search for the other four resumed, and search teams managed to find the remains of three.
The three soldiers have been identified as Flight Officer Chester L Rinke, 33, of Marquette, Michigan; Second lieutenant Walter B Miklosh, 21, of Chicago, Illinois; and Sargent Donal C Aiken, 33, of Everett, Washington. They were part of the bombardment mission and died in the airplane crash. Officials associated with the process said the remains will be sent to the US with due procedure.
The search was a joint effort by Gandhinagar-based

National Forensic Sciences University

(NFSU) and US-based University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL), as part of a tripartite agreement with the

Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency

(DPAA) of the United States. The teams visited the site in 2022-23 and collected a large cache of samples, including human remains and material evidence like buttons, boot fragments, identification tags, parachute fragments, coins, and survival compass backing. A recent analysis of the samples confirmed identity of the three soldiers.
Gargi Jani, project lead, NFSU, said, "Standard archaeological methods were used to excavate the site of the crash and its periphery. However, since the sediments were saturated with water, a wet-screening operation was used to force water through a series of pumps and tubes and force the mud through 6mm mesh screens to remove the mud and find any small piece of evidence." A stepped excavation method was used as a safety measure to avoid collapse as trenches were often over 3 metres deep, she said. The DPAA website mentioned the identification was carried out based on material and anthropological evidence along with techniques such as 'mtDNA', 'Y-STR', analysis by scientists from the Armed Forces Medical Examiner System.