Locating long lost corpses may sound macabre, but Dr Robert Pastor knows that his work is genuinely about reuniting families with their loved ones.

The 48-year-old anthropologist has joined Bradford University as a lecturer direct from a three-year stint with the US Army Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii to recover the bodies of solders lost after they were killed in action in places like Vietnam.

His team was responsible for crossing off a number of names from the missing list.

Three fighter jet pilots who came down in different parts of Vietnam were found and identified and the remains of two marines whose plane was shot down over Savannakhet in Laos were discovered and repatriated.

"It brings a great deal of resolution to families who just don't know what happened to their son, brother or husband," he said. "If we can positively identify the remains and bring them home for a proper burial it means a lot.

"There are a minority of people in American who firmly believe that brother John is locked up in a bamboo cage somewhere in the jungle."

More than 2,000 American army personal are still listed as missing in Vietnam and as time goes on recovering their remains becomes harder.

But the project is driven by an enormous amount of political and popular pressure from the American people.

Dr Pastor was part of the team which went into remote areas - often hacking back virgin jungle as they went - to reported sightings of planes going down or officers being seen.

Armed with anecdotal evidence, the team identified an area and used metal detectors to locate dog tags, zippers on uniform or even flight ejection seats.

The team looked for things like teeth, which can be matched with dental records or for remains which can be DNA- tested.

"Most of the time there is very little left in the area," he said. "Local people will have stripped an aircraft parts, so you will find a wing strut propping up a tent and so on."

But although the trail had cooled, it had not gone completely cold and during his three years Dr Pastor worked on 12 different sites, of which half produced human remains.

Closer to home, Dr Pastor's expertise was called on to help locate the shallow grave of a 16-year-old murder victim in Birmingham. A man had confessed to West Midlands Police that he had killed the boy, but initially refused to give even a hint of where the body lay.

Eventually he relented and told officers that the body was buried in the overgrown back garden of a house in the city.

Dr Pastor, who completed his PhD at the University of Oregan and then worked at the famous John Hopkins University in Baltimore, worked with fellow Bradford University forensic archaeologist Paul Cheetham as part of the Forensic Search Advisory Group, drafted in to work with police.

The killer had given an accurate fix on where he had disposed of the body, but scientists had to go carefully for fear of ruining vital evidence.

Excavating the clandestine graves of murdered children is immensely distressing, says Dr Pastor. But in order for murderers to be convicted and families to have their lost relatives returned it is a job that has to be done.

"It can be very unpleasant, but you have to deal with it as a scientist and put macabre aspects out of your mind.''

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