Hospitals across the country were today expecting a flood of calls from worried families after the full scale of the NHS organs scandal was revealed.

More than 100,000 hearts, lungs, brains and other organs are being held, many of them taken from patients whose relatives have no idea they buried an incomplete corpse, a report by the Government's Chief Medical Officer concluded.

Professor Liam Donaldson's report said that for decades hospitals across the country ignored and deviated from the law governing the removal and retention of body parts during post-mortem examinations. Doctors stripped body parts from patients, including the head of an 11-year-old boy, and preserved the bodies of stillborn babies, then disposed of them as clinical waste in a way which Prof Donaldson said would shock the public.

Thousands of relatives may now demand to know if their loved ones were stripped of their organs and then have to go through the agony of a second funeral to bury the body parts.

Meanwhile, a separate report into the hospital that sparked the scandal, the Alder Hey Children's Hospital in Liverpool, accused pathologist Professor Dick van Velzen of systematically stripping organs from dead children, and recommended that he should not be allowed to practise again. The professor, who now works in Holland, built up an unnecessary, excessive, illegal and unethical collection of body parts, according to the report. He now faces criminal charges after it was passed to Merseyside Police and the Crown Prosecution Service.

Other staff may also face criminal charges. The trust's chief executive and chief laboratory scientific officer were last night suspended following publication of the report.

Health Secretary Alan Milburn made a public apology to the families of children who had died and been stripped of their organs at Alder Hey. He vowed: Those who did wrong will now be held to account.

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