A disturbing report that the Ministry of Defence admitted that it mixed up the bodies of British soldiers killed in Afghanistan.

Body parts of British soldiers who died on operations in Afghanistan have been mixed up and placed in the wrong coffins.

What interests me about this report is the implicit assumption that the state has a responsibility to care for its dead soldiers in a particular way. Britain no longer follows the procedures it developed during the First World War that involved identifying soldiers’ remains for burial on or near the battlefields. Instead of legislating that all war dead remain overseas, the policy in recent years has been to repatriate their remains.

It is also interesting to contrast the forensic work undertaken to identify these remains with what was done after the First World War and after the Second World War. Faced with tremendously more remains to identify, dispersed over much larger areas, and lacking present-day medical technology to assist with identification, the Imperial War Graves Commission did a remarkably good job of preventing these sorts of mistakes from occurring. Even their work was not perfect.

I wonder the precise moment during the past few decades when the job of identifying remains on the battlefield was no longer for the Commonwealth War Graves Commission but instead for the Ministry of Defence.

The full article from the Guardian: Family shocked as MoD admits body parts error

The BBC has a report on the topic as well: Body of UK serviceman in mix-up