New DNA bid to identify 9/11 victims
New DNA technology is reportedly to be used in a bid to identify remains of New York's September 11 victims which are still unclaimed, giving hope to more than 1,000 families who never had any part of their loved ones' bodies to bury.
The city's Medical Examiner's Office is set to pay $1.5m (€900,000) to a firm that will use a powerful, computer-based system to match damaged or partial DNA samples with those provided by relatives, according to the New York Post.
Identifiable remains of some 42% of those killed when the World Trade Centre was attacked - 1,151 out of 2,749 victims - are yet to be found, despite painstaking efforts.
A total of 20,730 remains, which include tiny bone fragments and tissue, have been recovered in the last five years.
However, 9,797 of them have not been identified. That figure includes 760 remains found on top of the wrecked Deutsche Bank building at Ground Zero in recent months.
Cybergenetics, the Pittsburgh-based firm which will reportedly take on the task, says its TrueAllele system aims to extract more information from existing DNA samples than previously possible, and can reanalyse samples 1,000 times faster than current methods.
The intense fires that burned in the wreckage of the twin towers have made identification more difficult.
Rose Foti, who lost her firefighter son Robert when the buildings collapsed, told the Post: "I didn't have a coffin. I didn't have any remains. This is better than nothing.''
Margie Miller, whose husband Joel was killed, said: "We look to all opportunities to have some resolution so families can have a proper burial. There are a lot of families still struggling with this.''
