Nine Sept 11 hijackers’ remains lie unburied, unclaimed

By Khalid Hasan

WASHINGTON: The remains of nine September 11 hijackers found from the Pentagon and Pennsylvania crash sites lie unburied and unclaimed with the FBI.

The remains of the 184 victims at the Pentagon and 40 who perished in Pennsylvania are said to have been identified through DNA testing several months ago.

The Associated Press (AP) quotes Donn Marshall, who lost his wife at the Pentagon as saying, “I think in Islam, you’re supposed to be buried whole, so I would take them and scatter them all over the place. They don’t deserve any kind of religious courtesies.”

None of the families of the nine hijackers has come forward to claim the remains and the US authorities are not sure what to do with them. Eight of them were supposedly Saudi Arabian citizens but the Saudi government has maintained complete silence on the matter.

The AP reported that “families of the airplanes’ passengers and crews and those who died within the Pentagon provided DNA samples, typically on toothbrushes or hairbrushes, to aid with identification. The remains that didn’t match any of those samples were ruled to be the terrorists, said Chris Kelly, spokesman for the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, which did the DNA work. The nine sets of remains matched the number of hijackers believed to be on the two planes.

Without reference samples from the hijackers’ personal effects or from their immediate families to compare with the recovered DNA, the remains could not be matched to an individual.”

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