Robert Shaler, the scientist who led the forensic examination by the New York City medical examiner’s office to identify 9/11 victims, releases a book about this investigation, called Who They Were: Inside the World Trade Center DNA Story: The Unprecedented Effort to Identify the Missing. According to Shaler the investigation eventually identified three of the 9/11 hijackers. However, he writes that they were not identified by name because the ten DNA profiles supplied by the FBI had no names attached. Shaler writes, “No names, just a K code, which is how the FBI designates ‘knowns,’ or specimens it knows the origins of. Of course, we had no direct knowledge of how the FBI obtained the terrorists’ DNA.” He also believes the three hijackers they identified were in the backs of the planes, stating, “I still doubt the pilots have anything remaining to collect or analyze.” [Publishers Weekly, 8/22/2005; New York Daily News, 10/12/2005] The medical examiner’s office concluded its efforts at identifying the remains of those killed at Ground Zero in February 2005, having been able to identify 1,588 of the 2,749 victims. [Shaler, 2005; New York Daily News, 2/23/2005]
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