THE families of more than 1,000 victims of the World Trade Centre attack face the heartbreak of knowing that their loved ones may never be identified after the New York coroner’s office announced that it had exhausted its efforts to trace DNA from the thousands of body parts recovered from the scene.

The New York City medical examiner, which has tested almost 20,000 fragments of human flesh, blood and bone, has identified 1,588 of the 2,749 people reported missing when two hijacked airliners crashed into the twin towers on September 11, 2001. But it said yesterday that the remaining 1,161 victims may never be identified unless new technology allows DNA to be extracted from 9,720 stored body parts.

“We have exhausted the technology that is available to us today to make any further identifications,” Ellen Borakove, a spokeswoman, said. “All the remains have been freeze-dried and vacuum-packed so they do not deteriorate any further so that perhaps we will be able to extract DNA using new technology.

“We are never going to give up. We have promised the families that,” she said. “We are calling it a pause.”

The coroner’s announcement means that many families will have to accept that their loved ones disappeared as the towers crumbled into a pile of smouldering rubble that burnt for weeks.

“Unfortunately, there are 1,161 of us who have never received a call from the medical examiner to get any kind of identification,” William Doyle, whose son Joey worked at Cantor Fitzgerald in the World Trade Centre, said. “The only ID I got back of my son was his driver’s licence they found in the landfill.”

“But I hold my trust in the medical examiner because I know they are not going to stop,” he said. “They do have broken-down DNA and other remains . . . we have to wait for better technology to appear.”

Experts say that, in order to make a DNA match, the coroner has to be able to extract a sample of 18 to 36 human cells — far less even than the residue left when a finger is rubbed on a glass slide.

The medical examiner recovered 19,916 body fragments at the World Trade Centre and at the landfill in Staten Island where the rubble was dumped. After initial success in identifying remains, however, only eight DNA matches have been made in the past six months.

Diane Horning, who lost her son Matthew, has started a group called “WTC Families for Proper Burial” to lobby for rubble to be moved to a proper cemetery. “Everything was taken from the World Trade Centre to the New York City garbage facility at Fresh Kills landfill,” she said. “We know that there are remains sitting on top of household refuse,” she said. “What we have been saying from Day 1 is: Get them out of there! Our intention is that there should be an international cemetery.”

The relative of a British victim raised the issue when families met President Bush, but the US Government has yet to intervene.

Of the 2,749 presumed dead, only 292 families received a “full body” for funeral.

9/11 TOLL

2,749 people died in the World Trade Centre

At least 13,000 survived the terrorist attacks

1,588 victims identified based on physical remains

1,161 still unidentified

235 foreign nationals died, including 67 British, the largest single nationality group

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