NEW YORK: The name of an Indian-born doctor missing since the day before 9/11, was restored to the list of casualties in the terrorist attacks. The authorities took the decsion months after an appeals court declared that there was no other plausible explanation for her disappearance.

On Thursday, the city medical examiner's office said Dr Sneha Anne Philip, 31, was among 2,751 victims killed at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.
In 2004, Philip's name had been omitted from the list by officials who said they couldn't definitively link her to the site because she did not work there and had disappeared a day before the attacks.

Philip's family went to court and on January 31, the state Supreme Court's appellate division determined that she had died at the trade center and ordered that her name be returned to the list. The medical examiner cited the court ruling in a brief release.

Philip, a resident physician at a Staten Island hospital, was last seen on a videotape buying shoes and lingerie at a department store opposite the trade centre on September 10, 2001.

Investigators had once thought she could have been a victim of another crime or had disappeared on her own to escape troubles with marriage and alcohol.

Her family believed she likely attended a party held by the city's South Asian community in a hotel in the trade centre complex on September 10 and died while helping the wounded in front of the towers before they collapsed.

"The evidence shows it to be highly probable that she died that morning and at that site, whereas only the rankest speculation leads to any other conclusion," the court wrote.