The U.S.-led United Nations Command held a ceremony in South Korea on Wednesday marking the repatriation from North Korea last week of some remains of U.S. soldiers killed in the 1950-1953 Korean War.

"I welcome the many distinguished guests who have joined the command in properly honoring the remains of fallen warriors from the Korean War," Gen. Vincent Brooks, commander of the United Nations Command and U.S. Forces Korea, said during the ceremony at Osan Air Base, south of Seoul, ahead of the transportation of the remains to U.S. soil.

"We send them away from this ancient land onward to the identification laboratories in the United States where they can be positively identified and returned finally to their countrymen and their families, who never forgot them or the war that claimed them," Brooks added.

North Korea handed over the remains to the United States last Friday, the 65th anniversary of the signing of the armistice agreement that halted Korean War hostilities, as promised during a historic U.S.-North Korea summit in Singapore in June.

A U.S. Air Force transport aircraft arrived at the base on Friday with 55 cases of the remains thought to be of missing U.S. soldiers, each draped in the blue and white U.N. flag.

The remains will be analyzed for identification under the U.S. government's Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency once they are flown to Hawaii.

John Byrd, director of scientific analysis at the agency, told a press conference that the remains are consistent with those recovered in North Korea in the past and repatriated.

"There is no reason at this point to doubt that they do relate to Korean War losses," he said.

Later Wednesday in Hawaii, a ceremony will be held to receive the remains, with Vice President Mike Pence in attendance.

The handover of the remains came after North Korea suggested it wanted to see a public declaration of the end of the Korean War before it takes concrete steps toward the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.

Around 7,000 U.S. soldiers are listed as missing, with about 5,300 of them presumed to have gone missing in what is now North Korea, according to the U.S. Defense Department.