Sept 11 death toll drops after three found alive

The tally of people lost in the September 11 attacks has dropped, with three people reported missing in the World Trade Centre confirmed as alive, city officials said.

Police Inspector Jeremiah Quinlan, who heads the massive missing persons effort, said that investigators have spoken with the three people.

The discovery reduces the city’s official count of people killed or reported missing in the terrorist attack to 2,792.

Ellen Borakove, a spokeswoman for the city medical examiner, identified the three as Jeffrey Montgomery, of St Joseph, Missouri, William Yemele, of Gaithersburg, Maryland and Olivia Khemrat, of Jersey City, New Jersey.

The list of missing still could change as further errors are uncovered, Borakove said.

The three names plus six other mistaken cases were included among the 2,801 victims’ names read at a September 11, 2002, anniversary ceremony, and some are memorialised on a temporary fence at the trade centre site.

Of the 2,792 people believed lost in the attack, 1,439 have been identified - just nine in the last month, Borakove said. She said the identification process has not slowed as dramatically as the numbers seem to indicate, but rather that recent identifications matched victims already confirmed dead.

The toll does not include the 10 hijackers who died at the trade centre.