Ten days after the end of recovery operations at the site of the World Trade Center, construction workers are still finding the remains of September 11 victims in buildings adjacent to Ground Zero.
Fire officials and construction workers said on Saturday that several bio-hazard bags containing body parts had been removed from one building punctured by sections of the twin towers as they collapsed.
As well as bone fragments, the construction crews carrying out the clean-up operation have also come across debris from the planes that flew into the World Trade Center.
”During the clean-up, body parts have been found,” said
construction official Sal Marsciano.
”It sheds a new light on the whole process. It’s no longer just a clean-up process, it’s still a recovery process,” he said.
The recovery operation was wrapped up on May 30 with a sombre ceremony at ground Zero, during which a ”final” steel girder was removed from the site draped in the Stars and Stripes.
”The date the mayor chose for the ceremony was symbolic,”
stressed deputy assistant fire chief Edward Kalletta. ”We knew we weren’t going to be finished that day.”
More than 2 800 people were killed in the New York attacks,
which saw the impact of the collapsing twin towers tear holes in the walls and windows of many nearby buildings.
The discovery of new remains is likely to concern relatives of the victims who insist that the recovery operation be fully completed before the final clean-up begins.
Currently, according to official numbers, only 1 092 remains have been identified, leaving more than 1 700 families still hoping to find some remains of their loved ones. – Sapa-AFP