Efforts were under way Thursday to uncover and exhume the bodies of 11 Japanese soldiers believed to be buried in a World War II cemetery in the northeastern Indian state of Assam.

A Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) official said digging at the cemetery in Assam's main city of Guwahati had begun Wednesday, overseen by a three-member delegation from the Japanese government.

The 11 servicemen were killed fighting British and Indian troops in April-June 1944, during the Japanese offensive into India in which tens of thousands of Japanese soldiers died.

The exhumation effort followed a formal Japanese request made in 2010 to repatriate the remains of the soldiers in the wake of a CWGC report on their probable whereabouts.

No remains have been retrieved so far.

"According to information available to us, along with the bodies there were valuables of the dead soldiers buried in the cemetery in the wooden coffins," said Ken Miyashita, a foreign ministry official with the Japanese delegation.

"The idea is to get at least some remains so that we can take them back and bury them as per Japanese rituals."

The cemetery, which is maintained by the CWGC, contains more than 500 graves, including those of 486 Commonwealth servicemen.