How Many People Were Killed in the September 11 Attacks?
The exact number of victims of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, is not definitively known due to uncertainty around the number of those killed at the World Trade Center. However, the official death toll, after numerous revisions and not including the 19 terrorists, is 2,977 people. At the World Trade Center in New York City, 2,753 people died, of whom 343 were firefighters. The death toll at the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, was 184, and 40 individuals died outside Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
Counting the casualties from the World Trade Center attack
Because the September 11 attacks caused such massive destruction and intensely hot fires, the remains of many victims were never recovered, and others remained unidentifiable. Consequently, the precise number of victims killed at the World Trade Center has remained uncertain. Flight manifests provided information on the number of passengers and crew on each of the ill-fated airliners, and tight security procedures at the Pentagon gave investigators a clear picture of who was in the building at the time of the attacks. Access to the World Trade Center, however, was not thoroughly documented or tightly monitored, and there was no clear way to determine who exactly was in either of the twin towers at the time of their collapse. That issue was compounded by the fact that hundreds of those who worked in the towers were foreign nationals—including perhaps some who were undocumented workers—which made exact identification difficult if not impossible. In addition, the generous financial remuneration that the U.S. government offered the families of the deceased motivated some unscrupulous individuals to make fictitious claims that loved ones or family members had been among those killed.
- American Airlines flight 77 crash at the Pentagon: 184—6 crew members, 53 passengers, and 125 office workers on the ground
- United Airlines flight 93 crash in Shanksville: 40—7 crew members and 33 passengers
- American Airlines flight 11 and United Airlines flight 175 crashes into the World Trade Center: 2,753—343 firefighters and 2,410 people in and around the buildings, including police officers
- Total casualties: 2,977
On the first anniversary of the attacks, the official toll of those killed in New York (including the passengers and crew of the two aircraft that struck the towers) rested at 2,801, but that number was soon amended when several names were determined to have been erroneous or listed twice. The new death toll of 2,792 remained unchanged until late 2003, when it was lowered to 2,752 after 40 more names were deemed to be either inaccurate or fraudulent. Given the 184 victims killed at the Pentagon and the 40 killed in Pennsylvania, the overall death toll of the September 11 attacks was reckoned at that time to be 2,976 people. That number was later revised to 2,977.
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Most estimates of the September 11 death toll, whether official or unofficial, do not include the 19 hijackers in their calculations.
