The Jeju 4‧3 Peace Foundation (Chairman Yang Jo-hun) announced that the identities of 12 missing victims of the 4‧3 were confirmed through the DNA testing of newly excavated remains in 2019.
Until 2018, 121 victims were identified through genetic identification of 405 remains excavated at locations including the Jeju International Airport site. With this new discovery, the number of identified victims increased to 133.
To this end, 291 surviving families collected additional blood samples, and the STR and SNP methods were used to identify the five unidentified remains. For those that still were not verified, the remains and bereaved families underwent the next-generation sequencing method (STR-NGS) to authenticate their identities.
As a result of the identification, 12 new persons were confirmed, including five death-row convicts from a court-martial in 1949 and seven victims of preventive custody from 1950. These are the remains unearthed between 2007 and 2009 from the northwest and the northeast side of the north-south runway at Jeju International Airport.
On the other hand, the two remains, whose relations as siblings were identified in 2018 but failed to be connected to their families, confirmed their relationship with surviving family members through additional blood collection.
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