A British soldier serving in Iraq died after a hospital transplant gave him a pair of lungs donated by a heavy smoker, a coroner has heard.

Corporal Matthew Millington, 31, of the Queen's Royal Lancers, was stationed in Iraq in 2005 when he was diagnosed with an incurable condition which left him unable to breathe; he was told that he would die unless he had a lung transplant.

He had double transplant surgery in April 2007 at Papworth hospital, in Cambridge, but less than a year later doctors found a tumour in the new lungs and, despite radiotherapy, Millington died in February 2008. Analysis revealed he had been given the lungs of a donor who smoked 30 to 50 roll-up cigarettes a day.

Immuno-suppressive drugs prescribed at Papworth to help Millington's body accept the lungs in fact sped up the growth of the cancer.

Siobhan Millington, his wife, told an inquest held last week that soon after the operations her husband said "his lungs felt like two deflated balloons".

North Staffordshire coroner Ian Smith recorded that Millington, from Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, had died of "complications of transplant surgery and immuno-suppressive drug treatment".

A spokeswoman for Papworth, the UK's leading cardiothoracic hospital, said that it was not unusual to use smokers' lungs, adding that all organs are "screened rigorously" before a transplant. "We have a strong record of high quality outcomes and this is an extremely rare case."

In the past year there were 146 lung transplants in the UK, and 84 people died while waiting on the transplant list, she added. "If we had a policy saying we did not use the lungs of those who smoked, then the number of lung transplants would have been significantly lower."

Millington's father, Lester, 64, told the Stoke Sentinel that he did not harbour any resentment over his treatment. "The hospital did everything OK. There were some things they said they would tighten up on, but they didn't do anything wrong.

"It turns out that 51% of all organs for transplants originate from smokers, which we didn't know at the time. Whether a person smokes or not, though, doesn't really come into the equation. It's all about whether the lungs inflate or not.

"We wish he could have lived longer, but we've got nothing to say against the hospital. They were as devastated as we were when they found out Matthew had an inoperable tumour."

He paid tribute to his soldier son: "He would try his hand at anything, and we were all so proud of him."