The body of a boy was kept from his grieving Fife family after they were told he had been cremated, denying them the burial they had wished for.
Lorraine Dobie was told Liam’s remains had been disposed of at Mortonhall in November 1997 but a report by Dame Elish Angiolini reveals his body was in fact not cremated until February of the following year.
Mrs Dobie, of Saline, praised Dame Elish for her probe into practices at Mortonhall but said her investigation merely scraped the surface.
Her baby was born asleep on November 5 1997. It had been her intention to have him buried in the village graveyard but she was told the next week he had already been cremated at Mortonhall.
It was only as a result of the recent inquiry that she was given the devastating news that Liam had in fact been cremated in February 1998.
As well as missing out on the burial she wanted for her son, she is still in the dark about where he was kept in the months before the cremation.
“We’re finding it incredibly hard to get our heads around that at the moment,” said Mrs Dobie. “Where was he from November? Someone must know where he was.
“We’ve got more questions we want answered. I really think there should be a public inquiry to find out what’s been going on, from the NHS right through to Mortonhall.”
A former manager of Mortonhall Crematorium has also called for a fresh probe and Scotland’s public health minister Michael Matheson said a public inquiry had not been ruled out.
Mrs Dobie, 55, described the heartbreaking moment she returned home without her son after he was delivered at Forth Park Hospital in Kirkcaldy.
She said: “We knew we were going to have an unhappy outcome and that our baby was dead when we went in to have him, but the staff at Forth Park were wonderful.
“We sat and held our baby for about two hours. We tried to put everything we wanted to say to him in a lifetime into that two hours, and then came home with absolutely nothing.
“The worst bit for me was not having anywhere to go. I think for most parents the bottom line is that knowing where the ashes are so you can go and place a flower or whatever.
“I did not want my baby cremated. I wanted my baby buried in the village where we live to help the grieving process, not only for us but also for our other children.
“They were all grieving as well. They were all looking forward to this new baby too.”
Overwhelmed with shock and grief, it was not until the next week that Mrs Dobie summoned the strength to phone and ask about her son’s remains.
She was given a number in Edinburgh to call, and when she rang was told her baby had already been cremated.
“Someone somewhere told me an absolute bare-faced lie and I hope they can live with it because we’re taking it very hard,” Mrs Dobie said.
Mrs Dobie praised Dame Elish and her team for the way they handled the investigation.
As a result of what they were able to find out, the family visited Mortonhall on what would have been Liam’s 16th birthday last year.
Sue Bruce, chief executive of City of Edinburgh Council, said: “On behalf of the council, I would like to offer my sincere apologies to the bereaved families for the distress they have suffered as a result of the practices at Mortonhall Crematorium.”Timeline to a tragedyThe chain of events leading to the publication of the Mortonhall Investigation Report was set off when freelance writer Lesley Winton started research for a book on behalf of stillbirth charity SANDS Lothians.
Ms Winton found out that while the ashes of babies at the privately-run Seafield and Wariston crematoria in Edinburgh were handed back to parents, those at the local authority crematorium, Mortonhall, were not.
During a discussion with the superintendent at Seafield Crematorium, she discovered that furnace settings could be altered to enable babies’ remains to be recovered, and questioned why this was not done at Mortonhall.
In October 2012, SANDS Lothians operations manager Dorothy Maitland met Mortonhall’s newly-appointed bereavement services manager Charlie Holt, who assured her that changes had been made to allow parents to receive ashes.
Ms Maitland, who was the bereaved mother of a baby girl cremated at Mortonhall in 1986, asked if any ashes had been recovered at the time.
According to the register held at the crematorium, her daughter had been interred in the Garden of Rest, but she was told it would not be possible to retrieve the ashes.
One of Ms Maitland’s SANDS colleagues, who lost her infant son in 2004, was also told her baby’s ashes had been laid to rest in the Mortonhall garden, despite records stating there were no remains following cremation.
The publicity prompted 250 families to contact City of Edinburgh Council to find out if their babies’ ashes had been recovered.
In December 2012, the council launched an investigation into concerns that parents had been told there were no ashes, when in fact ashes had been buried or scattered at Mortonhall.
And in 2013, Dame Elish Angiolini was appointed to undertake an independent investigation.