The US air force has expressed regret for any grief to surviving family members caused by a practice in which incinerated partial remains of service members were deposited in a Virginia landfill.
Air force officials said that partial remains - mostly soft tissue and bone fragments - of some service members had been cremated, incinerated and dumped in the landfill by a contractor.
The families were not notified because they had signed forms telling the air force that they did not wish to be informed of additional remains subsequently recovered from war zones in Afghanistan and Iraq.
It was reported last month that the partial remains of US military personnel had been dumped in a Virginia landfill before the procedure was ended in 2008.
Yesterday, The Washington Post reported that the remains of at least 274 troops had been put in the landfill, far more than the military had acknowledged earlier.
"We regret any additional grief to families that past practices may have caused," said air force deputy chief of staff Lt Gen Darrell D Jones.
The air force has opened a telephone hotline and an email service to answer questions from family members regarding the handling of remains. The move followed disclosures that officials at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware knew they had lost body parts of two service members killed in Afghanistan - but did nothing to correct sloppy practices at the base mortuary.
An air force review found that three senior officials had displayed "gross mismanagement" at the mortuary, the largest in the nation and an increasingly hectic place as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan sent the remains of thousands of US men and women to Dover.
Defence secretary Leon E Panetta has asked Gen John P Abizaid, who retired from the US army after commanding all US forces in the Middle East and Southwest Asia, to lead a review of operations at Dover.
New York Times