Remains of 9/11 Victims Dumped in Landfill

Small, incinerated portions of the remains of 9/11 victims ended up in a landfill, the Pentagon has acknowledged for the first time. The remains of victims of the attacks in Pennsylvania and at the Pentagon, too small to identify, were brought to the Dover Air Force Base mortuary, where they were given to a "biomedical waste disposal contractor," according to a Defense Department review of the mortuary. The cremated remains were incinerated by the contractor; mortuary workers assumed that "after final incineration, nothing remained."

In fact, the contractor deposited leftover material from the incineration in a landfill, the Washington Post reports. The Pentagon says "several portions of remains" from the 9/11 attacks ended up there. The news follows the Post's report last year that the mortuary had between 2003 and 2008 dumped portions of at least 274 troops' remains in a landfill after incineration, a procedure that family members didn't know about. Since 2008, the Air Force has disposed of such remains at sea. (More Pentagon stories.)