Military mortuary scandal over missing body parts

The United States Air Force has disciplined three senior officials at its largest mortuary after finding that they repeatedly lost the body parts of dead servicemen and in one instance removed a slain soldier's arm without his family's permission.

An 18-month investigation into the Dover Air Force Base mortuary in Delaware uncovered gross mismanagement and a "pattern of negligence, misconduct, and neglect" in the way it handled the remains of some 6000 American soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past 10 years.

When junior staff tried to blow the whistle on wrongdoing, they were first ignored and then retaliated against. One was threatened with redundancy. Their superiors, meanwhile, "knowingly misrepresented" the affair to government inspectors trying to establish what had gone wrong.

"They knew about these problems about two and a half years ago and only recently took action to correct them," said the head of the White House's Office of Special Counsel, Carolyn Lerner.

"Those responsible have been treated with kid gloves. They haven't been fired. In fact, a job was created for one of them to keep him employed."

Lerner's report identified multiple examples of wrongdoing at the mortuary.

In at least two instances, pieces of tissue belonging to soldiers killed in explosions vanished from plastic bags in which they were stored. The families were not told.

In another example of "systematic" and "egregious" misconduct, mortuary staff removed the arm of a dead soldier with a hacksaw, without seeking permission from relatives.

The man's family had asked for him to be dressed in uniform and placed in an open casket. But embalmers were unable to fit his corpse into the coffin because intense heat from the fatal explosion had fused the arm at 90deg to his body.

The report holds three senior staff members responsible for the mishandling of remains.

They are Robert Edmondson, the mortuary's former commander, his deputy Trevor Dean, and former mortuary director Quinton Keel. Edmondson received a letter of reprimand. Dean and Keel were demoted.

Lerner said: "I question whether the Air Force has taken appropriate disciplinary action."

Though the trio are accused of incompetence rather than criminality, the report claims that Keel deliberately misrepresented his actions to investigators, and that he tried, unsuccessfully, to fire a whistle-blower.

Air Force chief of staff General Norton Schwartz acknowledged systematic failures at Dover and ordered a review of the management of the entire mortuary.

- Independent