Bodies of missing U.S. soldiers identified in Iraq

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. military has identified the remains of two soldiers who were kidnapped in Iraq in May 2007 after their patrol came under attack south of Baghdad, the Pentagon said on Friday.

The bodies of Sgt. Alex Jimenez, 25, of Lawrence, Massachusetts, and Pvt. Byron Fouty, 19, of Waterford, Michigan, were flown from Iraq to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware on Thursday, the Defense Department said.

The families of the soldiers, who had been listed as "missing-captured" for about 14 months, were notified after the identities of the remains were confirmed at a military mortuary in Dover.

There was no official word on where the bodies were discovered. But the Boston Globe newspaper quoted Jimenez' father, Ramon "Andy" Jimenez, as saying his son's remains were found by Iraqi authorities two days ago and identified through dental records.

Jimenez and Fouty, both of the 10th Mountain Division based at Fort Drum, New York, were part of a patrol that was ambushed by insurgents on May 12, 2007, in Yusufiya, Iraq.

The two men were abducted with a third soldier whose body was found earlier.

The Sunni Islamist group al Qaeda in Iraq later said in a video that it had killed them.

The U.S. military launched a massive hunt to find the missing soldiers and discovered their ID cards in a raid on a house in Samarra, north of Baghdad, about a month after the attack.

In October, the military said it found an automatic weapon belonging to Jimenez in an arms cache seven miles from where the abduction took place.

(Reporting by David Morgan; Editing by Doina Chiacu)