Japan Association for Recovery and Repatriation of War Casualties members at the Maynamati war cemetery.
| Photo Credit: AFP

Japanese officials in Bangladesh are preparing the bodies of 23 soldiers who died during the Second World War to return them home after more than 80 years, exhumation teams said on Monday (November 25, 2024).

The bodies were exhumed from Bangladesh’s Maynamati war cemetery, near Comilla, where more than 700 people from multiple nations killed during the war were buried.

The government-backed Japan Association for Recovery and Repatriation of War Casualties is organising the recovery work to return the dead to Tokyo, the Embassy of Japan said in a statement.

The organisation says it seeks to return remains of Japanese war dead, especially from regions that saw heavy fighting during the war — including the Philippines, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Indonesia, and Myanmar.

Japan fought in China and Burma — today, Myanmar — against Allied forces, and tried to invade British-ruled India, of which Bangladesh was then a part.

Sajjad Ali Zahir, a retired Bangladeshi army colonel who was part of the eight-member excavation team, said the identity of the bodies would first be checked.

“The remains will undergo DNA matching, and once the process is complete, authorities will hand them over to the families,” Mr. Zahir said, adding the men were expected to be “buried with military honours”.

Eight decades on, the remains are in an “extremely fragile state”, he added, saying they included both full skeletons as well as “skull fragments and bones”.