2 new victims identified in 9/11 remains

Two more victims of the Sept. 11 attacks have been identified from the thousands of human remains that have been retested in recent months, city officials announced.

The names were not immediately released, but they were collected in the "initial recovery effort" in the first year following the 2001 collapse of the World Trade Center, said Ellen Borakove, spokeswoman for Dr. Charles Hirsch, the chief medical examiner.

Borakove would not say exactly where they were found. She said Monday that the new identifications had been made in the past week.

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

In all, 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.

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.