Remains of the Day

In June 2002, Miller, the Pennsylvania coroner, received a 4 a.m. phone call from a man in Lebanon who claimed he was the uncle of one of the hijackers. The man wanted to know why his nephew's remains hadn't been returned. "And I said, 'Well, we're not sure which one's which'," Miller recalls. "If he had any DNA material he could send me, I could cross-match like we did for the passengers and crew. Then I pointed out the FBI had custody of the remains—and that was the end of it." Would Miller have made the effort? He says the FBI has the final say, but as for him: "Absolutely," he says. "They are human beings that have passed away in the commonwealth just like my great granddad. I can't arbitrarily say who I will apply the law to … The Good Lord will sort out their deeds."

As a religious matter, says Rauf, what happens to the remnants of the hijackers is not of great consequence. Muslims believe that "all souls will be judged" by God, he says. "What determines the state of your soul is your actions while you were alive." The problem of what to do with the hijackers, Rauf says, "is not so different from Mumbai, where the Indian Muslim community rejected the terrorists because they did not regard them as Muslim and would not give them a Muslim burial. My conviction is that the American Muslim community would reject the 9/11 hijackers." Even so, he believes that the remains should be returned. It would be, he says, an example of "the highest morals. This is what makes America great."

The FBI and the New York Medical Examiner's office, which holds them in secret and in silence, has no policy that dictates what will become of them. "They didn't want to bury them, and they certainly won't put them in the same memorial as the victims," says Baum, who now heads the New Jersey State Police crime lab. "Everyone is waiting because no one quite knows what to do." In the end, inertia and indecision may provide the most fitting final resting place for the remnants of the terrorists, lost to time and memory in some forgotten government vault, unnamed, unburied and unwanted.

With Rana Fil in Lebanon

© 2009