Authorities have identified the remains of two more victims ahead of the 22nd anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States. DNA analysis has identified the remains of a man and a woman killed in the attack on the World Trade Center in New York, Mayor Eric Adams and the New York City Medical Examiner’s Office said.
“We hope that these new identifications can provide some degree of comfort to the families of these victims,” Adams said. The number of deaths from the attack on the World Trade Center whose remains were identified rose to 1,649. 1,104 additional deaths have not been identified to this day.
According to their own statements, the work of the New York medical examiners is “the largest and most complex forensic investigation in the history” of the USA. Accordingly, advances in DNA technology are helping the investigations. DNA fragments from victims are compared with samples from relatives. Nevertheless, the identifications are progressing very slowly. The last successful identifications were two years ago.
A total of 2,977 people were killed in the attacks on September 11, 2001, carried out by the terrorist network Al-Qaeda using hijacked aircraft: 2,753 in New York, 184 at the US Department of Defense near Washington and 40 in the US state of Pennsylvania.
The attacks shook the United States to its core and sent the world power into a decades-long “war on terror.” Every year, ceremonies commemorate the victims of 9/11, as the date is called in the USA – again on Monday.
