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Missing Indian woman died at WTC: court

New York: On the night before the September 11, 2001 terror attack, India-born Sneha Anne Philip bought three pairs of shoes, bed linen and lingerie at a department store across the street from the World Trade Centre.

She was never seen or heard from again.

Her loved ones feared she had been kidnapped or murdered by a stranger.

Investigators at first thought she may have orchestrated her disappearance to get away from a troubled marriage, fights over her suspected affairs with other women and a drinking problem that threatened her job.

But eventually her family became convinced she had gone to the WTC on September 11, perhaps to help victims, and had died there. She lived two blocks from the WTC.

And on Thursday, more than six years after the attack, an appeals court finally agreed, asking that Sneha Philip’s name be added to the official list of September 11 victims.

“As a family, we were obviously hopeful that, ‘OK, she’s still alive,’ in the beginning,” her brother, Ashwin Philips, said on Friday. “Obviously as time goes on, you realise, ‘OK, this is what happened’...”

Her husband, Ron Lieberman, who had gone to court to secure a place for his wife on the September 11 memorial, does not plan to sue over her death, said his lawyer.

Sneha Philip, a resident physician at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Staten Island, was born in India and had lived with her husband in New York for about a year before the attacks.

Dr. Lieberman and she had met at medical school in Chicago.

The case has been shrouded in mystery ever since the fires were raging at ground zero. Sneha Philip’s husband rushed home to their apartment that day and found no sign of her. Her body or belongings were not recovered at the WTC site.

Many theories circulated about the 31-year-old doctor’s whereabouts, along with the photographs her grieving husband left on billboards across the city. — AP

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