The bones of Alistair Cooke, one of the great broadcasters of the twentieth century, were stolen days after he died last year at the age of 95, according to reports in New York.

Cooke's bones were removed by a surgeon and then sold for around $7,000 (£4,000) to two companies that provide tissue for transplant operations, said The Daily News.

Paperwork describing the bones, which were cancerous and too old for use in transplants, was reportedly altered to say they came from an 85-year-old man who died of a heart attack.

Cooke, who presented his Letter from America on BBC Radio for 58 years, died aged 95 at his home in Manhattan last March. He died of lung cancer, which had spread to his bones.

Weeks later, his family fulfilled his dying wish by sprinkling his ashes in Central Park, defying a local bylaw by surreptitiously throwing them from Starbucks cups.

But last week, prosecutors from the Brooklyn District Attorney's office, which is leading a year-long investigation into the illegal sale of body parts and bones from New York funeral homes, called Cooke's family to say that his corpse had been mutilated and sold.

Cooke's daughter, Susan Kittredge, an Episcopalian Minister who preaches in Vermont, said she was "shocked and saddened that following his death, parts of his body were illegally sold for transplant," the newspaper said.

"That people in need of healing should have received his body parts, considering his age and the fact that he was ill when he died, is as appalling to the family as is that his remains were violated," she said.

Richard Price, the former chairman of Bafta and a friend of Cooke's who runs the Alistair Cooke Trust, said: "Today's news is horrendous and our sympathy goes to his widow and the other members of his family."

The body of Cooke, best known in America for 22 years presenting Masterpiece Theatre, a Sunday evening television show, is thought to have been caught up in a long-running scheme to steal and take apart corpses for sale in America's lucrative body tissue industry.

Acting in good faith, funeral homes and hospitals across New York are believed to have provided bone, skin and heart valves to Biomedical Tissue Services Ltd, a New Jersey-based company that then sold the parts to tissue processing companies.

Since news of the investigation broke in October, New York newspapers have been emblazoned with headines of ''ghouls,'' ''harvests'' and ''Body-Snatch Probe Widens.'' In one case, the body of a woman whose bones were believed to have been removed was exhumed to reveal that her legs had been filled with plastic piping.

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