Twenty years have passed since the 9/11 attacks that took the lives of nearly 3,000 people, but the identification of victims is still ongoing.



According to the New York Times (NYT) on the 7th (local time), two detectives visited the home of Nyea Morgan, 44, who lost her mother in the 9/11 terrorist attacks on Long Island, New York last month.



Morgan, who was working for the company at the time, was called by his son to inform him that "the detective came because of my grandmother."



It was the news that the remains of Dorothy Morgan, who passed away on September 11, 2001, while working for an insurance company on the 94th floor of the North Tower of the World Trade Center (WTC) in New York City, were found after 20 years.



Dorothy's DNA sample, submitted by her family 20 years ago, was re-examined by the New York City Coroner's Office using state-of-the-art techniques and found that the identity matched the small piece of bone.



"I still didn't know they were doing identification," Morgan told The New York Times.



Dorothy became the 1,646th DNA-identified victim of the 2,753 people killed at the WTC in New York in the 9/11 attacks.



A few days later, the remains of the 1647th victim were further identified, but their names were not disclosed at the request of the family, the New York City Coroner's Office said.



They became the first confirmed 9/11 victims since 2019.



In the early days, hundreds of identities were identified each year, but recently the pace has dropped to less than one per year.



New York City's coroner's office has recovered more than 22,000 fragments of some of the dead from the scene of the attack, but has yet to find the identities of 1,106 people, 40% of the victims.



This is because many of the remains found in so-called 'Ground Zero' have been damaged or decomposed under the rubble of buildings for several weeks, making DNA extraction difficult.



In 2005, the coroner's office announced that it was halting the identification project because DNA forensic technology could no longer confirm the identity, but in the same year, thanks to technological advances, work resumed immediately.



As the COVID-19 pandemic began last year, the search for the identity of the 9/11 victims was somewhat pushed back.



New York City Chief Medical Examiner Barbara Sampson described it as a "sacred duty", calling it a "sacred duty" to make this work a top priority to keep her promise to her family 20 years ago.



"We promised to do this at any cost, no matter how long it took," he told The New York Times. "We will continue to do so."



However, it is impossible to identify all victims, the NYT noted, with some victims completely burned out and others refusing to submit their DNA samples.



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