Missing doctor who vanished during 9/11 took years to be recognised as victim
A doctor who went missing during 9/11 and was later officially declared among the victims of the terrorist attack went through years of claims that she'd disappeared for another reason.
The last confirmed sighting of Sneha Anne Philip was the day before 9/11 when she was spotted shopping at a department store by CCTV.
That's the last time the 31-year-old was seen, and the following day when terrorists hijacked two planes and crashed them into the World Trade Center her husband Ron Lieberman started calling friends and family to ask if anyone had seen Sneha.
Their home had been a couple of blocks away from the Twin Towers but Sneha had not been back on the night of 10 September, as she sometimes stayed with her brother or cousin.
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Ron told New York he hadn't been worried that his wife hadn't come back last night, but did want to tell her to call if she wasn't going to be back that night, but with nobody able to say they'd seen her he started getting very worried.
Sneha's body was never found, she was listed as a victim of 9/11, and her family thought that the doctor might have died treating the wounded at the Twin Towers.
The lack of any kind of evidence makes any theory as to what happened to her hard to prove, because there essentially is no proof for what happened to her after she was seen on CCTV the day before.
Police investigating the doctor's disappearance found her contract at one job hadn't been renewed due to 'alcohol-related issues', The Independent reports, and had been suspended from another job for not meeting her substance abuse counsellor.
Court documents also described 'marital problems' such as Sneha regularly staying out at night and not telling Ron, while her brother John was said to have claimed he'd once walked in on her and his girlfriend having sex.
It fuelled theories that she might have been living another life and disappeared, though in time a number of claims fell apart as Ron insisted there weren't problems in the marriage and John said police had made up his claim about his sister and his girlfriend.
However, the suspicion and lack of clarity on Sneha's situation led to her being removed from the list of 9/11 victims in 2004, with a judge saying there as 'no evidence' to show she was alive on 9/11.
A year later her official date of death was given as 10 September, 2004, three years after the time she was last seen.
Her family protested against the ruling, as Sneha's mother Ansu said it was 'more peaceful for me to think she died in the World Trade Center' than to 'think somebody killed her' the day before.
It took several years for her family appealing that decision to successfully overturn it, and in 2008 Sneha was reinstated onto the list of 9/11 victims.
The judge who approved their appeal said it was 'highly probable that she died that morning, and at that site', and it would take the 'rankest speculation' to come to another conclusion.
As such her name was included on a monument to those killed in the terror attack and she officially became victim number 2,751 of 9/11, with a memorial museum recognising that 2,977 people were killed as a result of the events of that day.
Many of the recognised victims of 9/11 have never been officially identified, though new DNA testing technology has helped confirm the identity of some who died that day.
Joe Harker