LONDON Professor Dick Van Velzen has broken his silence over the scandal that rocked Britain when it was revealed that organs had been illegally stripped from the bodies of thousands of dead children at a Liverpool hospital.

But on Monday Tony Bell, the new acting chief executive at Alder Hey Hospital, said it was up to Professor Dick Van Velzen to substantiate his claims that he never removed organs from children without their parents' consent.

Professor Van Velzen has been barred from working in Britain after the report on the Alder Hey scandal accused him of responsibility for the illegally stripping and retention of organs at the hospital.

"It sounds like he is saying he instituted an international protocol which required him to remove whole body parts," Bell said. "But I wonder how he then communicated that with his colleagues who were required to gain consent."

However, Bell did acknowledge that during the seven years Professor Van Velzen worked at Alder Hey procedures for obtaining parental consent for postmortem organ removal had been inadequate.

Professor Van Velzen, currently under police protection in Holland, had earlier told Britain's BBC broadcasting company that it was not his fault. He was interviewed in Amsterdam where he refused to go on camera but allowed his voice to be taped.

He commented: "I've never taken organs without parents' permission. I have carried out postmortems, either with parental consent or on behalf of a coroner. People forgot to tell the parents what the postmortem actually is. It's terrible. It's not my fault."

Professor Van Velzen, 51, said he inherited a run-down, dilapidated system when he started work at the Alder Hey Children's Hospital in Liverpool.

Police are investigating possible criminal charges against Professor Van Velzen over organ retention at Alder Hey. A warrant has also been issued for his arrest in Canada after children's organs were found in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where he went after leaving Liverpool.

The acting chair of the Alder Hey support group says Professor Van Velzen was both patronizing and arrogant in his attitude to parents. Ed Bradley, whose daughter Niamh died in 1990, aged just 38 days, also claimed to be confused by the pathologist's reference to "international protocol" and the stripping of entire organs systems.

"He speaks about following international protocol and I haven't got a clue what he means by that," Bradley said. All I know is that under British law, you cannot remove organs from the body without explicit consent, or on the order of the coroner."

(DPA)