Nearly 22 years after September 11, 2001, two more victims of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York have been identified. This is thanks to advanced DNA tests with new techniques on remains of the victims.
The man and woman, whose names are not being released at the request of their families, are the 1,648th and 1,649th identified victims of the attacks. The man’s remains were found at the crash site in 2001, and the woman’s in 2001, 2006 and 2013.
More than 2,700 people were killed in the destruction of New York City’s skyline-defining towers. The remains of 1,104 dead, about 40 percent of the victims, have never been found or identified.
Thousands of remains
Researchers have been investigating the many thousands of human remains found among the rubble at Ground Zero for more than twenty years. In some cases they work with bone scraps the size of a Tic Tac, they described earlier. One of the lead investigators, Jason Graham, calls it “the largest and most complex forensic investigation in US history.”
Every now and then victims are still identified, but that had not happened for some time. In September 2021, exactly twenty years after the attacks, two deaths were last linked to recovered human remains.
Tomorrow marks exactly 22 years since al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked four planes to carry out suicide bombings in the US. New York Mayor Eric Adams says the city, where there will be memorial gatherings tomorrow, is thinking of the relatives. “We hope these latest identifications provide some comfort to the families of the victims,” he said.
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