US: Millions of tons of rubble from the World Trade Center disaster on September 11th, 2001, and human remains that cannot be recovered, should not have their final resting place among New York's garbage, families of the victims said yesterday.
A lawsuit, filed in the southern district of New York on Monday, seeks to have the estimated 1.2 million to 1.8 million tons of rubble from the World Trade Center site - sifted through multiple times to locate human remains - transferred out of the Fresh Kills rubbish dump in New York's Staten Island.
The families named New York, its mayor, Michael Bloomberg, and other city officials in the federal suit.
"We find ourselves facing this fourth anniversary of the September 11th murders still having to ask permission to travel to a dump site to visit the mortal remains of the people the city calls 'heroes'," Diane Horning told a news conference. Her 26-year-old son Matthew worked on the 95th floor of tower one, for an insurance broker.
Of the 2,749 killed, only 292 full bodies were recovered, the lawsuit said. In many cases, partial remains as small as a bone shard were identified and returned to the families. For some 1,200 victims, no remains were identified.
Because of possible remains, members of World Trade Center Families for Proper Burial have sued to bring the rubble to a new international cemetery, possibly in the New York area.