A grieving father today rejected an apology from a Kent hospital for putting the 1lb 1oz body of his premature baby into a linen basket that was then taken to an external laundry and boil-washed.
The body of James Kelly Fernandez, who died an hour after his birth, went missing from a mortuary in Queen Mary's hospital, Sidcup, Kent, and was not seen again until it appeared mutilated on a conveyor belt at the premises of an industrial cleaning firm, Sunlight Services, 13 miles away in Brixton, south London.
A hospital spokesperson said it was a "tragic mistake" and offered an unreserved apology to Mr Kelly and Ms Fernandez, adding that the trust had implemented changes in work practices to ensure that a similar mistake could never happen again.
His parents, Patrick Kelly and Amaia Fernandez, believe someone had taken the shroud-wrapped corpse from the fridge where James was to be stored until his funeral and left him on the floor in a pile of dirty linen.
An inquiry revealed that cramped storage conditions meant it was customary to identify babies on the floor. The bodies were not kept in "clean, opaque, waterproof containers" as guidelines stated, but simply laid in the refrigerator on a sheet.
Helen Moffatt, chief executive of Queen Mary's hospital trust, said: "The laundry basket within the mortuary was right next to a cabinet where the bodies of babies were kept and this combination has led to the mistake.
"This is totally unacceptable from our point of view. It is a one-off mistake of a type that has never been seen at Queen Mary's before."
The couple discovered that James's body was missing on December 13 - four days before the funeral was due to take place - after undertakers went to the hospital to pick him up. If the funeral had taken place between eight and 12 weeks later it may have been too late to find the body.
Ms Fernandez, who was 23 weeks into a pregnancy complicated by the blood disease toxoplasmosis when James was born on November 17, has returned to her native Spain to receive medical care, Mr Kelly said this morning.
"She is traumatised, she has lost her son, she's gone to Spain - for two reasons, one, to see her family and to try to get over all this, and two, to get medical attention in Spain because basically it is lot quicker for her to be checked out.
"She just feels that she had to go home, she needed to recuperate. She just lost confidence in this country."
Martin Roberts, human resources director of Sunlight Services Group, which runs the Brixton laundry, said that it was not normal to sort through hospital laundry before washes because of the "foul" nature of some of the linen coming in.
The incident follows a scandal at Bedford hospital last year, where bodies were photographed piled under sheets in a chapel of rest.
Derek Conway, Conservative MP for Old Bexley and Sidcup, said he would be tabling a private notice question in the House of Commons, calling on a health minister to give a statement on the treatment of bodies in hospital mortuaries.
"There are all these tragedies, all these things you see in the paper about how people have suffered at the hands of the NHS," Mr Kelly said.
"There is always a spin, always someone to say this should have happened or that should have happened, we have made a mistake, we are looking into it, we are going to change things.
"But why do they have to be changed after the event? Why can't people see these things before the event? It is just common sense."
James' funeral was eventually held on January 3, in Lewisham, south-east London. Due to the injuries he sustained in the laundry his parents could not leave the casket open before his cremation as they had wished.
