- NEW YORK (Reuters)
- The number of people killed in the attacks that destroyed New York's
World Trade Center has dropped by 40 to 2,752 after investigators found
further incidence of fraud, duplication and people once thought dead, city
officials said on Wednesday.
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- The official death toll has fluctuated frequently since
two hijacked passenger planes were slammed into the 110-story twin towers
on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, at a time when tens of thousands were
normally in the vicinity of the lower Manhattan complex.
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- "Forty names have been taken off the list,"
said Ellen Borakove, spokeswoman for the city's medical examiner. "Two
or three are still being investigated, so those could still be removed
in the future."
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- For more than a year until Wednesday, the figure has
remained at 2,792, according to police and the medical examiner.
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- The revision changes the overall official number of those
killed in coordinated attacks by four hijacked aircraft to 2,985. A plane
flown into the Pentagon near Washington killed 189 people and another crashed
into a field in Pennsylvania, killing 44 people.
-
- The official tolls do not include 19 hijackers linked
to Saudi-born Islamic militant Osama bin Laden 's al Qaeda, the global
network Washington blamed for a series of attacks on U.S. interests abroad
and at home since the mid-1990s.
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- The destruction of the twin towers was so great that
medical officials have only been able to positively identify the remains
of 1,527 victims.
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- Some of the 40 taken off the New York list were originally
reported missing by people living overseas. Police conducted exhaustive
worldwide checks of names and details to arrive at the latest figure.
-
- Days after the attacks that caused the collapse of the
soaring towers, officials feared the number of people killed would be more
than 6,000. Over time, the estimate dropped to 4,500 and then to 3,900.
By the time of the first anniversary, the official number of confirmed
deaths was 2,801.
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