Yeltsin visits Canada; see A2.Russian and U.S. investigators said Friday they found no evidence that an American prisoner of war was held in a Stalin-era labor camp in northern Russia, but they will continue the search for American POWs.
The Russian side of a joint commission on POWs and MIAs said it did turn up documents showing ethnic Germans had been held at Camp No. 5, one of 10 prisons in the remote Pechora region where Soviet leaders sent dissidents as well as criminals."We found no evidence of the presence of an American," William Davnie, a political officer at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, said at a news conference.
"But work will continue and our report will be made public only after everything has been analyzed."
A nine-man delegation from the U.S.-Russian commission traveled to Pechora on Thursday after President Boris Yeltsin disclosed that American POWs imprisoned in the Soviet Union might still be held.
The delegation said it was investigating reports that an American pilot, going by the name David Marken, was being held at Camp No. 5, in the once-closed area known as PL-350.
A private American group searching for POWs, the Ark Project, said it believed the man being sought was 1st Lt. Robert Martin, who was taken prisoner by North Korea during the Korean War.
The U.S.-Russian delegation met local officials Thursday and Friday, and toured the camp outside Pechora, a town of 70,000 people 900 miles northeast of Moscow.
After examining prison documents and interviewing prison officials and inmates, the delegation said 23 people named Marken or something similar had been held at the camp, but none fit the missing man's description.
Asked whether the commission had a photograph of Marken, Davnie paused for several seconds before saying, "No . . . not yet."
The POW commission, headed by Russian Gen. Dmitri Volkogonov and former U.S. Ambassador Malcolm Toon, said in March it had found no evidence of American servicemen from the Vietnam or Korean wars in the former Soviet Union.
It did produce death certificates of eight Americans held in Soviet camps after World War II. It was not known whether they were U.S. servicemen or Nazi sympathizers.
Russian spokesman Col. Anatoly Volkov said there was new evidence that ethnic Germans had been imprisoned at the camp.
"The information will require additional research," Volkov said, giving no other details.
Josef Stalin imprisoned thousands of Soviet citizens and others he believed were opposed to his war effort against Nazi Germany.
"We don't have any Americans here," said Maj. Gen. Leonid Khamluk, the military chief in the
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region, a network of labor camps built before and during World War II.
"We heard some rumors that somebody was around here, but nobody has ever seen him. And I don't believe them," said 18-year-old soldier Alexander Babenko, posted at a guardhouse overlooking the campyard.
The camp, which has more than 200 prisoners, is surrounded by a high fence topped by barbed wire. It contains several buildings, including a hospital, barracks and small factories where prisoners make furniture.
The crumbling concrete road around the camp had been swept clean, and the few prisoners allowed outside wore clean, black uniforms.
In Israel Thursday, former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev denied he knew American POWs from the Vietnam War were transferred to the Soviet Union, as Yeltsin claimed.
"I know nothing of the existence of such facts that Yeltsin was talking about," Gorbachev said.