An inquiry into whether British nuclear establishments illegally removed and stored the body parts of former workers for medical tests is preparing to widen its brief to include coalminers, industry sources suggest.

Michael Redfern, QC, the inquiry chairman, invited families of nuclear workers to come forward with their concerns in July. It is understood that surviving families of deceased miners have told the inquiry that the heart and lungs of their relatives were removed, without consultation, during postmortem examinations.

The suggestion is that the National Coal Board was interested in diseases associated with mining such as pneumoconiosis and emphysema.

This year a worker at the West Cumberland Hospital said that lungs were routinely removed at the request of the National Coal Board. The man, now retired, said he had witnessed the procedure and that it was common throughout the 1970s and 1980s.

After the development, a number of correspondents expressed their concern to the Whitehaven News, in Cumbria. They had learnt the truth after the event from postmortem examination reports. One wrote: “I worked at Haig Colliery and am disgusted that good men like my father-in-law, who worked damned hard for little pay for over 50 years in the coalmining industry, could be treated like animals and not even afforded the respect of being left whole after death.”

In April, the Government announced the Redfern inquiry into human tissue analysis in UK nuclear facilities between 1962 and 1992. Mr Redfern was given the task of investigating 65 cases, and any more that emerged, after The Times’s disclosure that removing organs without the consent of families was normal practice at the Sellafield plant in Cumbria.

The inquiry has evidence that body parts were taken at Harwell, a former research site in Oxfordshire, as well as Aldermaston, in Berkshire, Capenhurst, Cheshire, and Springfields, Lancashire. Mr Redfern is due to report his findings in the new year.

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