page_title: No Gun Ri massacre
section_title: Continuing appeals
hierarchical_section_title: No Gun Ri massacre / Later developments / Continuing appeals
caption_attribution_description: English: The Memorial Tower in the No Gun Ri Peace Park, with its three- and two-dimensional depictions of the refugees of 1950, and two arches representing the No Gun Ri tunnel entrances. The 29-acre park, adjacent to the massacre site in Yongdong County in central South Korea, opened in October 2011. It also contains a museum and a peace education center.한국어: 노근리평화공원의 기념탑.
context_page_description: The No Gun Ri massacre occurred on July 26–29, 1950, early in the Korean War, when an undetermined number of South Korean refugees were killed in a U.S. air attack and by small- and heavy-weapons fire of the 7th Cavalry Regiment at a railroad bridge near the village of Nogeun-ri, 100 miles southeast of Seoul. In 2005, a South Korean government inquest certified the names of 163 dead or missing and 55 wounded, and added that many other victims' names were not reported. The No Gun Ri Peace Foundation estimated in 2011 that 250–300 were killed, mostly women and children.
  The incident was little-known outside Korea until publication of an Associated Press story in 1999 in which 7th Cavalry veterans corroborated survivors' accounts. The AP also uncovered declassified U.S. Army orders to fire on approaching civilians because of reports of North Korean infiltration of refugee groups. In 2001, the U.S. Army conducted an investigation and, after previously rejecting survivors' claims, acknowledged the killings, but described the three-day event as "an unfortunate tragedy inherent to war and not a deliberate killing". The Army rejected survivors' demands for an apology and compensation.
context_section_description: Although often supported by South Korean politicians and newspaper editorials, the No Gun Ri survivors' repeated demands for a reopened U.S. investigation and compensation went unheeded. Meeting with South Korean officials in 2001, the survivors asked that their government seek action at the International Court of Justice at The Hague, and in U.N. human rights forums, but were rebuffed. In 2002, a spokesman for South Korea's then-governing party called for a new U.S. inquiry, but the Defense Ministry later warned the National Assembly that a reopened probe might damage U.S.-South Korean relations. 
   The disclosure in 2006 that Pentagon investigators had omitted the Muccio letter from their final report, along with other incriminating documents and testimony, prompted more calls for action. Two leaders of the National Assembly appealed to the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee for a joint investigation, but no U.S. congressional body ever took up the No Gun Ri issue. In a 2015 book, David Straub, U.S. Embassy political chief during the No Gun Ri investigation, wrote that meeting the survivors' demands would have set an undesirable precedent for similar cases from 1950 Korea. After a delegation's visit to No Gun Ri, the annual General Assembly of the US Presbyterian Church adopted a resolution in June 2016 calling on church leadership to urge the U.S. president and Congress to issue an apology and appropriate compensation for the No Gun Ri killings.
caption: The Memorial Tower in the No Gun Ri Memorial Peace Park, with its three- and two-dimensional depictions of the refugees of 1950, and two arches representing the No Gun Ri tunnel entrances. The 33-acre park, adjacent to the massacre site in Yongdong County in central South Korea, opened in October 2011. It also contains a museum and a peace education center.
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