Experts aim to identify Argentine war dead on Falklands
BUENOS AIRES: Experts will this month start work to identify Argentine soldiers buried on the Falkland Islands who were killed fighting Britain over the territory, the Red Cross said on Thursday.
The unidentified bodies of 123 Argentine soldiers have lain since after the 1982 war in a cemetery on the remote South Atlantic islands, governed by Britain but claimed by Argentina.
The Red Cross has examined the cemetery and will now send a team of 10 experts to exhume the dead and take bone samples for genetic testing, the head of the mission Laurent Corbaz said.
“We’ll start the exhumation process on (June) 19, until the end of August. We’ll take bone samples in the 123 tombs and rebury the remains,” he told a news conference in Buenos Aires.
The bone extracts will be compared to DNA samples from relatives of soldiers known to have died in the fighting, he said, adding that results were expected by the end of this year.
“We are going to try to identify as many as possible,” he said, but cautioned: “There are more families looking for soldiers than graves” in the cemetery.
Graves at the Argentine memorial cemetery on East Falkland Island, known in Spanish as Isla Soledad, carry the inscription: ‘Argentina soldier known only to God’.
Britain and Argentina signed an agreement in December to identify the Argentine soldiers.
The two countries fought a brief war over the islands, known as Las Malvinas in Spanish, in 1982 after Argentine forces under the country’s then military dictatorship occupied them.
The 10-week confl ict killed 649 Argentine soldiers, 255 British soldiers and three islanders. — AFP