More errors, confusion on Arlington graves

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ARLINGTON, Va., March 21 (UPI) -- Arlington National Cemetery, which still cannot locate all its graves, also has lost track of site reservations, a U.S. official admits.

Kathryn Condon, who took over the Army National Cemeteries Program last year after the previous leadership was ousted in the graves scandal, told The Washington Post Arlington has 3,500 reservations on file but there could be more.

Officials have no idea how many of those reservations are still valid or how many of those who reserved plots are even still alive, she said. Some reservations are more than a century old.

After years of bad record-keeping, there are no reliable data on how many reservations have been made for plots, the newspaper reported Sunday.

Last year, Army investigators found graves were marked incorrectly or not at all, that urns had been dug up and dumped in a dirt pile, and that millions had been wasted on botched attempts to digitize the cemetery's records.

More errors have emerged since, with some veterans buried in the wrong plots and a mass grave that held eight sets of cremated remains.