London:
Police departments in Britain retained at least 492 human body parts, including brains, hearts and limbs, even after investigations were over, without informing victims' families, an official probe has found.
The Association of the Chief Police Officers said that the body parts were from murder investigations or cases involving other suspicious deaths that date back as far as the 1960s, the
Guardian reported.
Police said that there was a legal requirement for them to retain human body tissue samples after post-mortem examination in murder cases.
According to the British law, body parts can be stored until a convicted prisoner has served his sentence. But the uncovered samples relate to the cases that are no longer subject to investigation.
The audit did not include samples from the current criminal investigations.