WAR: 1,161 Ground Zero Victims Unidentified: Forensic Effort Ends

Robert Shaler, director of forensic biology at the medical examiner's office, told the New York Daily News that the forensic effort to identify the remains of those killed at the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001 has ended. 1,161 of 2,749 victims remain unidentified at the conclusion of the efforts, with around 10,000 unidentified bone and tissue fragments that cannot be matched to the list of the dead. The examiner's office will contact all the families of victims who requested notification upon termination of the forensic identification efforts.



I can only wonder at who all those unidentified people could be, and my heart goes out to all the victims and their families. Were they office workers? Homeless people caught in the fray? People on the planes?

How could there be so many left unidentified? That's almost half of all the people that perished on that dreadful day. Somehow this just doesn't make too much sense to me, with all of the DNA technology that we have available. But I suppose they of all people would know how to use it. The fact that so much of Ground Zero was obliterated in the collapses probably didn't help any. Whether you believe that hijackers or the government did it, one thing is for sure: we lost many american lives that day. Once again I take a moment of silence and rememberance to reflect on that terrible tragedy.

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Goes to show you how much trust you can put into forensic testing and DNA. Forget what you see on all those TV shows - that's Hollywood. Here is real life America.

Here you are with 10,000 bones and plenty of DNA samples but they can't seem to match them up. Can't match up the bones to other bones, can't match anything up with DNA samples from families with missing relatives. And these families have given DNA samples to help find matches.

And we are still using DNA to send people to the death penalty?

Well from what I have read, it may be that they don't have alot of DNA left to go on, as much of it may have been destroyed, or rendered unreliable from the sheer heat, which at certain temperatures can destroy it. And this issue is just one of the controversial topics on the whole 9/11 matter. If the DNA was destroyed to an extent, then this again raises the question of how they were able to identify 19 hijackers so quickly.

Bones are notoriously hard to extract DNA from, forensics generally prefers flesh , saliva or hair to get DNA. Plus you then have to have another sample to MATCH from - quite a few of these people could be from other countries, or live on their own etc, or there wasnt a decent enough match because of partial DNA fractures etc

They identified the hijackers because they didnt hide their identities at all - they were in the country under proper visas and passports, and had purchased tickets in their names. It was a quick matter of going through the passenger lists and checking up on all the people onboard, and they discovered a link between the hijackers - generally if two people who flew into the country together die on the same day in the same incidents, theres going to be a connection.