17 years of 9/11, 1100 victims still unidentified

The terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre completes 17 years today. Nearly 3,000 people died and thousands more were injured in the 9/11. Seventeen years later, more than 1,100 victims of the hijacked plane attacks on the World Trade Center have not been identified.

A team in a New York lab is avidly working to identify the remains, with technological progress on its side. At first, they examine a bone fragment found in the wreckage of the Twin Towers. It has yet to be matched to DNA.

Mark Desire, assistant director of forensic biology at the Office of Chief Medical Examiner in New York said, "The bone is the hardest biological material to work with".

"And, on top of that, when they're exposed to things that were present at Ground Zero, fire, mold, 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."

Shockingly after 17 years, only 1,642 of the 2,753 people who died in the attacks in New York have been formally identified. The 1,111 others have yet to yield identifiable information.

Desire added, "These are all the same protocol that we had in 2001, but we were able to improve the process for each of the steps, out of necessity,"

On the other hand, a New York City subway station has been reopened for the first time since it was destroyed 17 years ago in the 11 September 2001 terrorist attack.

(Featured image: Sputnik International)