Two victims identified, 22 years after the 11 September attack

22 years after the 11 September 2001 attacks on the United States, the remains of two victims killed in the World Trade Center towers in New York have been identified using DNA, the authorities have announced. The identities of the two victims, a man and a woman, have not been revealed at the request of the families.

They bring to 1,649 the number of people whose remains have been identified, out of a total of 2,753 dead. «We hope that these new identifications will bring some comfort to the families of the two victims» said the city’s mayor, Democrat Eric Adams, in a statement on Friday.

Another 1,104 victims have still not been identified, and the last two identifications date back to 2021. When the South Tower and then the North Tower of the World Trade Center collapsed after the attack, the violence of this cloud of fire, steel and dust was such that no DNA trace has ever been found for the hundreds of dead.

He two new identifications were made possible by «a recently adopted next-generation sequencing technology that is more sensitive and faster than conventional DNA techniques» used in particular by the US army.

The jihadists had hijacked four planes, two of which crashed into the World Trade Center towers, one of which gutted part of the Pentagon near Washington, and another of which crashed into a wooded area in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. These attacks, the deadliest in history, killed a total of 2,977 people.

The 1.6 million tonnes of debris from the World Trade Center smoked for 99 days and it took more than 8 months for some 40,000 people to clean up the site.

Aline Johson