SOMERSET — The Western Pennsylvania coroner who helped identify victims of United Airlines Flight 93 expressed surprise Tuesday about a Pentagon report that said partial, incinerated remains of some 9-11 victims from the crash in Shanksville that couldn’t be identified were sent to a landfill.

Flight 93 crashed into a field in the rural community after passengers and crew, some alerted by cell phone calls from loved ones about the New York attacks, decided to try to wrest control of the plane from four hijackers. Forty passengers and crew were killed.

The plane crashed during the struggle, and investigators later determined the hijackers intended to crash it into the White House or Capitol in Washington, D.C., where the House and Senate were in session that morning.

The Pentagon on Tuesday released a report by an independent committee asked to examine practices at the military’s mortuary at Dover, Del. It said that some partial, incinerated remains of 9-11 victims at the Pentagon, where 184 people were killed when a plane struck it, along with some remains from Flight 93, were cremated and given to a biomedical waste disposal contractor who incinerated them.

Somerset County Coroner Wallace Miller told The Associated Press that the only remains that ever left the area where Flight 93 crashed were DNA samples sent to federal researchers.

Samples of victims from aboard the plane were returned, while samples from four hijackers’ remains are still being held by the FBI for potential military tribunals.

Miller said he last spoke to the FBI last fall, but had not heard about the Pentagon report until Tuesday.

“I wouldn’t know how there would be any possibility how any remains would get to Dover,” Miller said in a phone interview with The Associated Press.