9/11 victims’ remains were sent to landfill

Partial remains from some victims of the September 11 attacks were dumped in a landfill, the US defence department has said.

Tuesday's admittance, the first of its kind, comes after a report that exposed years of mishandlings at the US military's major mortuary at the Dover Air Force in Delaware.

The portions of remains that ended up at a landfill came from the 2001 attacks on the Pentagon as well as a hijacked airliner that went down in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, on 9/11, according to the report by an independent panel.

The report also said that remains of some US troops killed in Iraq and Afghanistan had been mishandled at the mortuary.

The military had acknowledged last year that some portions of remains of fallen soldiers had been incinerated and sent to a Virginia landfill, a practice that angered military families and led to a new policy.

Since 2008, the military decided to dispose of unidentified cremated remains at sea. But the review, released on Tuesday, said “several portions of remains from the Pentagon attack and the Shanksville, Pennsylvania, crash site” were also taken to an unidentified landfill.

The report contradicts a 2011 US Air Force account which said there were no records that showed how remains at Dover were handled before 2003.

Details of how the 9/11 remains were disposed of were buried as background material in the report, which focused on how to fix management problems at the troubled mortuary.

The review also contained other revelations of botched management at Dover, with officials raising concerns about problems at the mortuary as early as 2002.

In 2006, the remains of victims killed in the crash of a naval training T-29 aircraft were disposed of as “medical waste” instead of in a group burial, it said. Aljazeera