The identities of the two victims, a man and a woman, were not released at the request of the families. They increase the number of identified remains to 1,649 out of a total of 2,753 dead.
Twenty-two years after the jihadist attacks of September 11, 2001 against the United States, the remains of two victims killed in the towers of the World Trade Center in New York have been identified using DNA, authorities said ahead of a new memorial service.
The identities of the two victims, a man and a woman, were not released at the request of the families. They bring the number of people whose remains have been identified to 1,649, out of a total of 2,753 deaths after an al-Qaeda commando threw two planes into Manhattan’s Twin Towers, the New York Law Health Authority (OCME) said.
“We hope these new identifications will bring some comfort to the victims’ families, and the efforts of the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner demonstrate the city’s unwavering commitment to reuniting all World Trade Center victims with their loved ones,” the city mayor said Democrat Eric Adams said in a statement Friday.
1104 unknown victims
1,104 victims still could not be identified, the last two identifications are from 2021. When the South Tower and then the North Tower of the World Trade Center collapsed after the attack, the violence of the fire torrent, The amount of steel and dust was so great , that no trace of DNA could ever be found from hundreds of dead people.
The two new identifications were made possible thanks to “recently introduced next-generation sequencing technology – more sensitive and faster than traditional DNA techniques” and used in particular by the US military, explains the OCME.
The attacks are commemorated every year with official ceremonies in New York, including on Monday.
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In total, the jihadists hijacked four planes, two of which hit the World Trade Center towers, one that ripped open part of the Pentagon near Washington, and another that crashed in a wooded area of Shanksville, Pennsylvania. These attacks, the deadliest in history, killed a total of 2,977 people.