Inspired by this thread. I think the tangent is more appropriate here.
I was under the impression that the bodies were all vaporized by the explosion, and there were no human remains from any of the planes. The article linked from the other thread says that the FBI has the remains of the hijackers. Which I think begs the questions…
What kind of shape are the remains in? Morbid question, I know, but I’m really wondering. Pieces? Ashes?
How were they recovered? I remember stories about passports and hands found blocks away from Ground Zero. Wouldn’t any remains on the site have been buried under all the steel when the towers collapsed?
How can they tell the remains of the hijackers apart from the remains of the passengers? Sort of related to #1. Are they recognizable at all, or did coroners have to resort to dental records and DNA patterns?
There were debris thrown out if the building in the initial moments of the crashes, likely including some human remains, and some of it wouldn’t have been buried in the collapse.
I imagine the lower you were in the building, the more pulverized you would get, and the planes hit relatively high up.
The FBI/NYC coroner’s office positively identified remains of most of the victims, so why not that of the terrorists?
I did read somewhere that there were some bodies ID’s from a single small tissue sample, and one fragmented body that was recovered in more than 100 separate pieces, ALL individually identified as belonging to that one body.
So it does not strike me as strange at all that the FBI has in its posession the fragmentary remains of most of the hijackers. It’s somewhat more surprising that they could be identified as such.
Dismembered body parts were ejected from the building when the planes first hit, and rained down on the streets and buiulding below. I read the account of one fire fighter who went out on the roof of an adjacent building, and found it covered with body parts. The following eyewitness report appeared in Viillage Voice on Sept. 11, 2001:
[WAG]
The victims of the crashes were not instantly incinerated in the explosion, and the body parts found in the recovery were most probably those of the passengers, hijackers and building occupants in the immediate path of the planes, which ejected the their body parts before the fire and collapse of the buildings caused the rest of the victims’ remains to disintegrate.**
Well, Intense heat does not destroy a body completely. Cremation in fact does not reduce the body completly to ash, some small bone fragments remain.
Of course, between the heat and the great deal of crushing weight, I can understand quite well how hard it would be to ID the bodies from the WTC. I Imagine that most of the bodies were in pieces and scattered. With trace evidence being all that remains. Such as yojimbo mentioned IDing by small samples found might be the only way, but it can be done.
I remember that they found two hands clasped together on top of one of the adjacent buildings, I believe tied together with a nylon tie. This was likely a crewmember of one of the airplanes.
Well, I have the grim honor of being the most qualified to answer this information, as this has been the work of the office I’m employed by.
As others have noted, there were in fact remains from both the buildings and the planes. I don’t have the exact official count but at last check we had in the neighborhood 15,000 body fragments ranging from nearly complete bodies to tiny bone fragments. Somewhere around 1300 out of 2843 vicitms have been identified.
**
The first week or so we got some full bodies but mostly pieces. Torsos, arms, feet and the like. As the crews at the WTC site dug into the wreckage, the pieces we received got smaller and smaller. As time went on we saw more bone than soft tissue. The soft tissue was decomposing and the bone fragments we got were charred. Near the end of the recovery effort, almost all we got was bone.
Originally, recovery was done at the site and everything was brought to the ME’s office. Eventually, all material was brought to the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island where workers sorted through the wreckage to find human remains which then came to us. But initally, a lot of fragments were found around the WTC site.
I’m not sure if/how the hijackers were identified. IDs are made using a combination of different techniques like fingerprints, dental records and DNA. We in the DNA lab get samples from family memebrs and, if possible, from items used by the victim to compare with the samples.
It’s still very much an ongoing process. Camera crews were in our lab this past week. There will be a story on our lab on ABC’s Primetime Thursday August 29th. It should have a lot of information you’re curious about.
