Two New 9/11 Victims Identified Using New DNA Sequencing Technology

The end of a long wait for families. Two new victims of the attacks of September 11, 2001 have been identified, twenty-two after the jihadist attacks which affected the United States, announced Friday, September 8, the mayor of New York, Eric Adams. The remains of two victims killed in the World Trade Center towers have been identified using DNA, authorities said.

The identities of the two victims, a man and a woman, have not been released 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 deaths, said the New York Office of Forensic Medicine (OCME). “We hope these new identifications 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 “declared the mayor of the city in a press release.

These two new identifications were made possible thanks to a “recently adopted next-generation sequencing technology, more sensitive and faster than conventional DNA techniques” and used in particular by the American army, explains the OCME. More than 1,100 victims have still not been identified, and the last two identifications date back to 2021. When the South Tower, then the North Tower, of the World Trade Center collapsed after the attack, the violence of the flood of fire, steel and dust was such that no DNA trace was ever found for hundreds of dead.