Shocking New Pentagon Report: Some 9/11 Victims' Remains Ended Up in Landfill

WASHINGTON (The Blaze/AP) -- A new Pentagon report reveals that partial remains of some 9-11 victims were sent to a landfill after they could not be identified.

The victims were among those killed when a terrorist-hijacked airplane struck the Pentagon, killing 184, and another crashed in Shanksville, Pa., killing 40.

The report says 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 landfills was discontinued in 2008. The Washington Post offers more background on that:

In November, The Washington Post first disclosed that the Dover mortuary for years had disposed of incinerated portions of remains of troops killed in Iraq and Afghanistan in a Virginia landfill. The practice involved unidentified or unclaimed body parts; it was not made known to troops’ family members.

The Air Force later admitted that it had dumped the incinerated partial remains of at least 274 service members in the landfill between 2003 and 2008, when the practice ended. At the time, Air Force officials said their records only went back to 2003 and that they did not know when the landfill dumping began.

On Tuesday, a new Defense Department review of the mortuary operations at Dover revealed that “several portions of remains” recovered from the Sept. 11 attacks at the Pentagon and at Shanksville also ended up in a landfill.

According to the report, says the Post, the mortuary officials assumed that “after final incineration, nothing remained." But that was not the case, and the left over material from the incineration process was then taken by the contractor and dumped in the landfill.

The process has since been changed so that any such remains are now buried at sea.