17 years after September 11, more than 1,000 victims have still not been identified
Only 1,642 of the 2,753 people who died in the World Trade Centre attacks have been formally identified – sometimes as slowly as one person a year
Seventeen years later, more than 1,100 victims of the hijacked plane attacks on the World Trade Centre have yet to be identified.
But in a New York lab, a team is still avidly working to identify the remains, with technological progress on its side. Day in, day out, they repeat the same protocol dozens of times.
At first, they examine a bone fragment found in the wreckage of the Twin Towers. It has yet to be matched to DNA. Cut and ground to a fine dust, the remains are then mixed with two chemical products that can expose and then extract DNA. But success is not guaranteed.
“The bone is the hardest biological material to work with,” said Mark Desire, assistant director of forensic biology at the Office of Chief Medical Examiner in New York.
“And, on top of that, when they’re exposed to things that were present at Ground Zero, fire, mould, bacteria, sunlight, jet fuel, diesel fuel, all these destroy DNA. So you could physically have a sample with very, very small amounts of DNA there.”
