NYC Identifies 2 More Victims From Earlier 9/11 Remains

NEW YORK (AP) _ The city said Monday it has positively identified two more Sept. 11 victims from thousands of unidentified human remains that have been retested in recent months. <br/><br/>The new identifications

Monday, April 2nd 2007, 8:09 pm

By: News On 6

NEW YORK (AP) _ The city said Monday it has positively identified two more Sept. 11 victims from thousands of unidentified human remains that have been retested in recent months.

The new identifications were made in the past week, said Ellen Borakove, spokeswoman for Dr. Charles Hirsch, the chief medical examiner. The identified remains are from the ``initial recovery effort'' of victims' remains in the first year after the 2001 terrorist attacks, not from a renewed search at ground zero, she said.

Borakove would not say how many pieces of remains were identified or exactly when and where they were recovered. The names of the newly identified victims also were not released.

The city has been storing more than 10,000 unidentified bone fragments and other human remains, including more than 1,200 found since 2005.

The new identifications mean that 1,146 of the World Trade Center's 2,749 victims have yet to be positively identified. The city returned remains to three more victims' families in November, two months after Hirsch announced in a letter to families that ``new identifications will be forthcoming'' because of advances in DNA technology.

``Hopefully there'll be more to come,'' Borakove said Monday.

Family members who have been following the renewed search for remains have been frustrated by the recent search, and skeptical about how few new identifications have been announced since the recent finds in and around ground zero since last fall.

``It just seems very hard to believe that they haven't been able to make any sort of identifications from any of those pieces'' found in recent months, said Kurt Horning, father of a trade center victim and a leading critic of the city's search.