Hanoi (VNA) – A group ofAustralian veterans on September 10 handed over a database to Vietnam to help locatethe remains of about 200,000 Vietnamese soldiers of both front lines who are stillmissing.

A digitalised battlefield map in the formerprovince of Phuoc Tuy (most of the current Ba Ria-Vung Tau province in thesouth and Spratly archipelago), was presented to a visiting Vietnamesedelegation to Canberra led by Major General Tran Quoc Dung, head of the PolicyDepartment under the General Department of Politics of the Vietnam People’sArmy.

About 3,800 Vietnamese soldiers werebelieved to have been buried in the area during wartime.

The database is a 10-year research of thegroup led by Bob Hall, a military historian at the University of New SouthWales who is also a veteran in the war in Vietnam. It is the result of aproject entitled “Operation Wandering Souls – Bring Them Home”, which is hopedto locate burial sites of fallen Vietnamese soldiers.

Addressing the handover ceremony, Dung saidthe project of the Australian veterans who took part in the war in Vietnam hasgreatly contributed to the Vietnam-Australia relations in general and the bilateraldefence ties in particular.

With the support of Vietnam, six Australianmilitary personnel missing in action after the war in Vietnam had beenrepatriated to their home country.

A total of 200,000 Vietnamese soldiers ofboth front lines, who are still missing, had been buried in forests orbattlefields along the southern region of Vietnam, and Laos and Cambodia.-VNA