Partial remains of some 9/11 victims were sent to a landfill after they could not be identified, a new Pentagon report has revealed.
The victims were among those killed when a terrorist-hijacked aircraft struck the Pentagon, killing 184, and another crashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, killing 40.
The report said several portions of remains that could not be tested or identified were given to a bio-medical waste disposal contractor. The contractor incinerated them, then took them to a landfill.
The information was in a report on the military's Dover mortuary, where the practice of putting partial unidentified remains in a landfill was discontinued in 2008.
The number of victims involved was unclear.
The Pentagon released the report by an independent committee that was asked to examine practices at the military's mortuary at Dover, Delaware, the first stopping point for fallen troops coming home from war overseas.
"We don't think it should have happened," the committee chairman, retired General John Abizaid, told a Pentagon news conference.
The panel was formed after an investigation revealed last November that there was "gross mismanagement" at the Dover facility and body parts had been lost on two occasions.
After that investigation, news reports said that some cremated partial remains of at least 274 American war dead were dumped in a Virginia landfill until a policy change halted the practice in 2008.
The report was explaining the old policy, and said: "This policy began shortly after September 11, 2001, when several portions of remains from the Pentagon attack and the... crash site could not be tested or identified."
