The ashes of John F. Kennedy jnr, his wife Carolyn and her sister, Lauren Bessette, were scattered at sea yesterday near the spot from where their bodies were recovered on Wednesday.
Their plane crashed off Martha's Vineyard Island last Friday as they were on their way to the wedding of Ms Rory Kennedy at Hyannisport.
Mr Richard Evans, the chief medical examiner who performed the autopsies, said that "all three passengers died instantly upon impact as a result of the plane crash". They died "from multiple traumatic injuries".
The local newspaper, the Cape Cod Times, reported yesterday that Senator Edward Kennedy requested that photographs not be taken during the autopsy lest they end up in the tabloid press or on the Internet.
An assistant district attorney, Mr Michael O'Keefe, did not deny the report and said that "the wishes of the family were appropriately expressed. Where it was possible they were followed."
A senior police official was quoted in the Boston Herald as saying: "We know that there is going to be unusual interest in these pictures, so we are taking extra steps to maintain their security. We are going to be extremely careful with those images."
The request by Senator Edward Kennedy that the navy provide burial at sea for his nephew, wife and her sister, was immediately granted by the Secretary of Defence, Mr William Cohen, who ordered the naval destroyer, the USS Briscoe to Wood's Hole. As Mr Kennedy did not have any military service, he would not normally qualify for such a burial.
It is believed that Mr Kennedy himself had indicated that he would like to be buried at sea. About 15 members of the Kennedy and Bessette families were on the Briscoe for the scattering of the ashes following prayers by two naval chaplains and a Catholic priest.
Senator Kennedy, who accompanied the bodies to land when they were recovered yesterday, was also on the Briscoe but not Mrs Ethel Kennedy, aunt of the dead man.
The media were kept several miles distant.
Another naval ship, the Grasp, which recovered the three bodies on Wednesday, continued its search for pieces of Mr Kennedy's single-engined plane. The National Transportation Security Board will issue a report on the likely causes of the crash in several months time.
AFP adds:
Friends described Mr Kennedy as a "normal guy". But with dashing good looks, wealth and a past marked by extraordinary loss mingled with high privilege, John F. Kennedy Jr was something akin to a crown prince for Americans.
Even as he matured into a young man, Kennedy remained fixed in the minds of many as the three-year-old toddler saluting the casket of his father in 1963.
That memory was recalled across the US throughout the four-day search operation off the coast of Massachusetts.
Born on November 25th, 1960, just days after his father swept into the US presidency, "John John" first captured the hearts of Americans through photographs of him playing underneath the presidential desk in the Oval Office of the White House as the new president worked.
After burying his father, the young Kennedy once again had to stand at a funeral - this time that of his Uncle Robert, who was assassinated midway through his promising 1968 presidential bid when the young John Kennedy was eight years old.
His life, while imbued with the sparkle of wealth and fame, was also a portrait of cruel loss.
His younger brother, Patrick Bouvier Kennedy, died just three months after he was born in 1963; his uncle Joseph Patrick Kennedy jnr died in 1944 in an air crash in the second World War; his aunt, Kathleen Agnes Kennedy, died in a plane crash in 1958.
John's cousin David Anthony Kennedy died of a drug overdose in 1984, and another cousin, Michael Kennedy - son of Robert Kennedy - died at 39 in a skiing accident in Colorado in January 1998.