THOUSANDS of people have jammed hospital switchboards in attempts to discover if body parts had been removed from their dead relatives as the impact of the NHS organs scandal reverberated round the country.

Hospitals from Newcastle to Southampton took details from families who now fear they have buried their loved ones without their hearts, brains and other organs.

In the North-East, more than 400 worried relatives rang special help-lines.

"People are panicking. Some of the calls go back 30 years," said Sandra Bessford, spokeswoman for the Newcastle Hospitals Trust where 2,700 organs are stored.

The Tyneside trust alone had 130 calls, while South Tyneside Healthcare logged 48 calls.

Other busy centres included South Durham Healthcare, which registered 44, York Health Services which had 38 and South Tees Acute which logged 37.

Julie Oliver, spokeswoman for South Durham Healthcare, said: "The majority of calls are about babies and children and people are very distressed."

An independent commission is to be set up from April to oversee the return of organs to relatives for burial, or their disposal in an agreed manner by hospitals.

A report by the Government's Chief Medical Office on Tuesday revealed that more than 100,000 body parts are being stored in English hospitals.

The hospital at the centre of the scandal, the Alder Hey in Liverpool, said it had received hundreds of calls.

A report into Alder Hey, also published on Tuesday, found that the hospital's former senior pathologist, Dr Dick van Velzen, had systematically and illegally stripped children of their organs to build up a collection of more than 6,000 body parts.

It emerged last night that Prof van Velzen is about to be sacked by the Dutch hospital where he now works.

The Medisch Centruk Haaglanden in The Hague said it hoped to terminate his contract "very soon".

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