A GRIM chapter in the Alder Hey organ scandal will come to an end this month when the last human remains in the possession of the hospital are laid to rest.

A final burial service will take place for tissue samples, organs and foetuses which were never claimed by relatives.

The interment, on January 29, will be followed by a memorial service next month and the dedication of a memorial garden, the Liverpool hospital said.

It comes more than 10 years after it emerged Alder Hey had stripped hundreds of dead babies of their organs without the permission of relatives.

In January 2001, the official Alder Hey report, also known as the Redfern Report, was published.

It stated that Dutch pathologist Dick van Velzen systematically ordered the “unethical and illegal stripping of every organ from every child who had had a postmortem” during his time at the hospital from 1988 to 1995.

The Redfern Report revealed jars containing heads, hearts, brains, lungs and other major body parts of children were discovered at the Institute of Child Health (ICH), based at Alder Hey but run by Liverpool University.

A collection of 3,575 aborted or stillborn foetuses, some full term, were also at the ICH, supplied by hospitals from the 1950s to the 1970s and another 474 from the van Velzen era were found in his Myrtle Street laboratory.

The findings were described by the then Health Secretary Alan Milburn as “grotesque”.

Burial services for unclaimed remains have been taking place weekly since May last year at Liverpool’s Allerton Cemetery, where the memorial garden has been established. Paula O’Leary, of the Alder Hey parents’ support group PITY II, said she believes the remains have not been claimed because some parents are unaware of the extent of the organ retention.

Her 11-month-old son, Andrew, had his heart and 36 other body parts taken following his death from a brain haemorrhage in 1981.