ALISTAIR COOKE’S legs were chopped off by the body-snatching gang that plundered his corpse, his daughter revealed yesterday.

Susan Cooke Kittredge, a pastor in Vermont, wrote in The New York Times that the revelation had left her “slack-jawed”. “Just last week I discovered the unsettling detail that it was my father’s legs that were cut off and sold,” she wrote. “To know his bones were sold was one thing, but to see him standing truncated before me is another entirely.”

Cooke died of lung cancer that had metastasized to his bones in New York in March 2004 at the age of 95, after 58 years of recording Radio 4’s Letter from America.

Before his body could be cremated, it was harvested for bone, without his family’s knowledge, by a body-snatching ring. Four men, including an embalmer and a disgraced dentist who ran a tissue-supply firm, have been charged with stealing skin, bones, heart valves and other tissue from 1,077 corpses for sale to hospitals for use in surgery.

Prosecutors say that the gang often replaced plundered bones with PVC pipes to prepare the bodies for funeral. The bone was used in dental implants and other surgical procedures. To sell Cooke’s bones, the gang allegedly altered his cause of death from cancer to a heart attack, and lowered his age to 85.

Police recovered receipts for his bones from tissue-processing plants in New Jersey and Florida. Prosecutors say that the two tissue banks eventually rejected his body parts for medical use — although some may have gone elsewhere.

Times Recommends

• It’s only Brits who don’t appreciate me, says Blair
• Party’s over for Greek graspers
• White House tightens security for Xmas marathon