Smoke pours from the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center after they were hit by two hijacked airliners in a terrorist attack in Recent York City, Sept. 11, 2001.
Robert Giroux | Getty Images
Two victims who perished within the World Trade Center have been identified greater than 20 years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Recent York City’s chief medical expert said Friday.
The names of the victims, a person and a girl, are being withheld on the request of their families, officials said. They’re the 1,648th and 1,649th victims whose stays have been identified since 2001.
The stays of 1,104 victims, or 40% of those that died within the attacks, still haven’t been found nearly 22 years after al-Qaida terrorists hijacked industrial airlines and crashed them into the Twin Towers in lower Manhattan.
The towers were destroyed within the attacks, leaving greater than 2,700 people dead.
Dr. Jason Graham, Recent York City’s chief medical expert, described the painstaking effort to discover the victims’ stays as “the biggest and most complex forensic investigation” in U.S. history.
Investigators have spent a long time using DNA testing to discover tens of 1000’s of stays recovered from the Ground Zero disaster site. Greater than 30% of the stays recovered are still unidentified, based on the medical expert’s office.
Graham said in a press release Friday that the medical expert’s office has made a “solemn pledge” to return the stays of those that perished to their family members.
The identification of the person was confirmed through DNA testing of stays recovered in 2001. The girl was identified through the testing of stays recovered in 2001, 2006 and 2013.
The announcement that two victims were identified comes three days before the anniversary of the attacks. The person and the girl are the primary latest identifications since September 2021.
Lower than an hour after the attacks on the Twin Towers, al-Qaida terrorists crashed a 3rd industrial airliner into the Pentagon, killing 184 people.Â
Passengers in a fourth hijacked airliner heading for the nation’s capital fought for control of the plane. United Airlines Flight 93 crashed in a field outside Shanksville, Pennsylvania, killing all 40 people on board.Â
Within the wake of the attacks, the U.S. went to war in Afghanistan, where the leader of al-Qaida, Osama bin Laden, was sheltered by the Taliban. The Bush administration subsequently invaded Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein, who had no connection to the attacks.Â
Greater than 6,700 U.S. troops died in those wars.
Bin Laden was killed by U.S. forces during a raid in Pakistan in 2011. The Biden administration withdrew the U.S. military from Afghanistan in 2021 and the Taliban returned to power after the collapse of the U.S.-backed government in Kabul.
