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China has finally admitted to moving some of the POWs from the Korean war, after years of speculation about a missing 18-year old sergeant named Richard Desautels.

The information about him had been initially revealed to the US in private in March of 2003 - and passed on to his family - but then, the families went public with the information. Desautels' case is actually the first time that Chinese authorities have admitted to moving and burying some US POWs during the Korean War.

The information was initially suspicious, but within the admittance was important tidbits:

The reported circumstance of Desautels' death — sudden mental illness — may sound improbable. But the key revelation — that he was taken from North Korea to a city in northeastern China and then buried — matches long-held U.S. suspicions about China's handling, or mishandling, of American POWs during and after the war.

The new information also sheds some light on the Pentagon's reported stance about the returning of POWs from the war, as they had claimed that all POWs that were alive were returned. However, in the case of Desautels, he was moved from North Korea to a northeastern city in China, and employed as a truck driver in the camp until his death.

Desautels' reported burial site — the city of Shenyang, formerly known as Mukden — is interesting because it is far from the North Korean border and was often cited in declassified U.S. intelligence reports as the site of one or more prisons holding hundreds of American POWs from Korea. Some U.S. reports referred to Mukden as a possible transshipment point for POWs headed to Russia.

The Sergaent's case is of particular interest to the US government, as it could provide more information on other missing POWs that died of "various causes" around the conclusion of the Korean war. In terms of the Pentagon, their official stance is still that of 'all POWs were returned,' although with this case that has proved to be false.

American officials believed from the earliest days of the armistice that concluded the Korean War without a formal peace treaty in July 1953 that the Chinese and North Koreans withheld a number of U.S. POWs, possibly in retaliation for U.S. refusal to repatriate those Chinese and North Korean POWs who chose not to be returned to their home country out of fear of retribution.

In years since the end of the war, the US simply just dropped the public requests for information, but continued to press China in private. And until Desautel's information was brought to the public, there had been absolutely no progress.