SEOUL, South Korea (AP) -- A South Korean prisoner of war returned home today after escaping 45 years of captivity in communist North Korea, government officials said.

Staff Sgt. Chang Moo-hwan, 72, toiled at a North Korean coal mine before he managed to escape to China in August and find South Korean officials there, Defense Ministry officials said.

Chang arrived by ship in Inchon, a port city west of Seoul. He was not allowed to talk to journalists pending a government debriefing.

Chang, captured by North Korean troops toward the end of the 1950-53 Korean War, had been listed as killed in action, and a headstone bearing his name rests in the Seoul National Cemetery.

Seoul says more than 40,000 South Korean prisoners were not returned at the end of the Korean conflict, but the North says all POWs went home in 1953.

Only three POWs have successfully escaped the North since.

Former POW Yang Soon-yong, who escaped to the South in December, has said at least 59 ailing South Korean prisoners of war were still alive in a North Korean concentration camp.

Without a peace treaty, the two Koreas are still technically at war.