US aircrew's remains found in sunken WWII aircraft

The remains and personal belongings of five American airmen have been recovered from the wreck of a US Air Force plane, almost 70 years after it sank in Canadian waters, a diplomat said Tuesday. The amphibious plane was accidentally discovered by underwater archeologists in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence in 2009 and a 50-person US military team was sent earlier this month to search for the remains of the crash victims. They found the aircraft resting upside down in pitch black, frigid waters, about 40 meters (131 feet) down, two kilometers (1.2 miles) off the coast of Longue-Pointe-de-Mingan, Quebec, said US Consul General Peter O'Donohue. "In these extremely difficult circumstances, you could see the stress on the faces of the divers who were returning from the wreck," he told AFP, noting that the aircraft remained in fairly good condition. "The team has been able to recover quite a few artifacts, including instruments, personal items,...

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Philippine farmer finds mass grave; 30 skeletons exhumed

MANILA - A Philippine farmer unearthed a mass grave with the skeletal remains of up to 30 people believed to be victims of an internal purge by communist rebels in the 1980s, the army said on Sunday. Rommel Malinao was ploughing his field in a remote village in Quezon province, south of Manila, when he made the discovery on Saturday, army spokesman Major Harold Cabunoc said. The army deployed a team to cordon off the site and with the help of police forensics experts exhumed the skeletons. “As of last count, there were about 30 human skeletons,” Cabunoc said. “We believe these were victims of the New People’s Army (NPA) ‘kangaroo courts’, which sentenced to death many members they had suspected as government intelligence agents.” The NPA is the armed wing of the Communist Party of the Philippines, which has been waging a Maoist rebellion since 1969 — one of the longest-running communist insurgencies in Asia. At its peak in the 1980s,...

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ID-card may reveal mystery of crashed AN-12 aircraft

Manali (Himachal Pradesh), Aug 1 (IANS) A frayed identity card bearing the name Arjun Singh of Pune may reveal the 45-year-old mystery crash of an AN-12 aircraft of the Indian Air Force (IAF) into...

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