Body parts of British soldiers who died in operations in Afghanistan have been mixed up and placed in the wrong coffins. The UK government has admitted that the remains of at least one serviceman, who died in Britain's worst military disaster in the war, ended up inside another victim's coffin.
The issue came to light only when the personal belongings from one of the deceased were given by to a family who said they were not his.
Fourteen British servicemen died last September when a Nimrod MR2 crashed near Kandahar city. Relatives are now questioning how widespread the problems of identifying body parts are.
Trish Knight, whose 25-year-son Ben, a sergeant, died in the crash, said she was concerned that more body parts could have been mixed up and allocated to the wrong coffin.
"We don't know how many mistakes were made over this, but body parts were found in a wrong coffin and there may well have been more parts mixed up. We just don't know," she said.
The discovery almost prompted her to cancel Ben's funeral.
"We just thought, how can we go ahead if we are not sure if it's Ben's body in there or maybe somebody else's?" she said.
Families said they were informed of the mix-up by Royal Air Force officials at Kinloss air base in Morayshire, where 12 of the 14 victims from Number 120 squadron were based.
Concerns first arose over the treatment of British servicemen's body parts in 2003 after a Sea King helicopter crash in which eight British troops perished as the ground invasion of Iraq began.
Lawyers acting for four of the families involved in that incident said fears remained that the body parts of the dead servicemen were mixed up, concerns that were never satisfactorily answered by the Ministry of Defence.
Geraldine McCool, of the Manchester-based MPH solicitor firm which is representing the relatives, said: "The families I have spoken to lack confidence that they have been given the right body parts."
Internal military papers reveal that the parts of those who died in the Sea King crash in March 2003 were secretly taken to the US for DNA testing to separate the remains. Defense officials did not tell the families then.
The internal report into the Sea King crash admitted that no UK procedure existed "for the processing of disassociated body parts."
A Ministry of Defence spokesman said it had identified an incident where body parts had been mixed up.
Defense sources said one possible reason for what happened might have been the short time military officials had to clear the crash site near Kandahar, which is considered a Taliban stronghold.
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