Brooks Brothers store turned into morgue

Special report: terrorism in the US

Temporary morgues have been set up in the Brooks Brothers clothing store and other buildings near to where the World Trade Centre once stood.

The men's shirt department in the upmarket store is being used to house bodies recovered from the ruins until they can be moved for identification to the Institute of Forensic Medicine on First Avenue at 30th Street.

"No bodies have been brought in intact," said Tony Dajer, assistant medical director of the emergency room at the New York University Downtown hospital, who has been delivering medical supplies to doctors at the scene since Tuesday.

The Brooks Brothers store, at the bottom of a 54-storey building at 1 Church Street on the corner of Liberty Plaza, is one of the many structures which had been thought to be in danger of collapse. On Wednesday evening the site was cleared, but was later reopened. Tim Godfrey, an iron worker, reported that "the force of the blast put a lot of stress on this building".

The inside of the building has been watered down to clear debris at least a foot deep that was endangering the forensic operation.

Another temporary morgue has been established in the elegant lobby of the American Express building on Vesey Street. That too has been sanitised for its new use.

Because so few survivors have been recovered, the focus of medical operations in the city has centred on the recovery and identification of the dead.

Mayor Rudy Giuliani told a press conference that only 94 bodies had been recovered and numbered. Forty-six of those had been identified. Another 70 body parts had been found. Last night 4,763 people were on the missing list.

Eleven thousand body bags have been delivered to Manhattan island in preparation for the recovery of those killed in the attack. Ten refrigerated trailers, capable of carrying 1,000 bodies, are at the institute, and a barge carrying pallets of ice has been docked at lower Manhattan to preserve remains.

It is expected to be the biggest postmortem examination exercise in the history of forensic medicine.

"The first step is, 'who are you?'" said Dr Charles Hirsch, the medical examiner.

Relatives and friends who register a missing person are given a seven-page questionnaire which asks for intimate descriptions of their loved ones. It asks for scientific details, including blood type, and physical ones, such as any jewellery they were wearing, if they were circumcised, if they were wearing a wig, were their fingers tobacco-stained?

This information is then loaded into a computer programme supplied by a branch of the United States public health service.

Such details are required because examiners expect to recover very few whole bodies due to the heat of the fire and the nature of the collapse. Instead, much of the identification process will rely on DNA testing. A number of New York city firefighters whose helmets and face and limbs were burned beyond recognition but whose torsos were left intact have already been identified in that way.

Officials point out that bodies may also serve as a kind of crime scene, revealing, for instance, if anyone on the hijacked airplane was injured before the crash. In civil litigation which may follow the tragedy, the length of suffering endured before death is often a critical factor in the amount of a financial settlement or award.

If the remains of the hijackers are recovered, the medical examiner's office may be able to identify the culprits.

Investigators are planning to visit the homes and hotel rooms of missing persons to collect items such as clothing or hairbrushes which may contain traces of their DNA.

Also being examined for body parts is the tonnes of rubble being removed from the site. It will then be taken to the Fresh Kills landfill site in Staten Island, which until its closure last year was the city's main refuse dump, and sorted through by hand by FBI agents.

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