Cairo: The skeleton of an Egyptian soldier, who has gone missing since the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, has been accidentally found in Sinai, security sources and media said on Saturday.
The skeleton was found on Monday by workers building a trunk road in the centre of Egypt’s Sinai, the sources added.
The body was found clad in a military uniform along with a helmet and an identification card, one source said on condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to talk to media.
Banknotes of 35 Egyptian piastres (less than half a local pound) were also found along with the remains of the soldier. The circumstances of his death were not clear yet.
The soldier was identified as Abdul Hamid Mohammad Abdul Hamid, a schoolteacher, who went missing in the war at the age of 25.
He was a native of the province of Al Fayoum in south Egypt.
Military service is obligatory for men in Egypt.
“The body has been handed over to authorities that are contacting his family,” the source added.
The remains are likely to be buried in a cemetery commemorating fallen Egyptian soldiers.
The news that Abdul Hamid died in the war has come as a relief to his family.
“I now feel proud after sufferings of long years,” Mohammad Abdul Sameah, a cousin of the late soldier, said.
“Previously, we heard that he had been captured by the Israeli occupiers, a matter that distressed us a lot for long,” he told private newspaper Al Shorouk in Fayyoum.
Hundreds of Egyptian soldiers were killed or captured during the 1967 six-day war that gave Egypt its worst military defeat in modern times.
Six years later, the Egyptian army routed Israel in a surprise attack that set the scene for a peace treaty between Cairo and Tel Aviv signed in 1979.
In August 2014, workers digging an expansion to the Suez Canal, unearthed a skeleton of an Egyptian soldier, who went missing in the 1973 war.
