In this paper we propose a composite silence removal technique comprising of short time energy and statistical method. The performance of the proposed algorithm is compared with the Short Time Energy (STE) algorithm and the statistical method with varying Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR). In the presence of low SNR the performance of proposed algorithm is highly appreciable in compare to STE and statistical method. We have applied the proposed algorithm in the pre processing stage of speaker identification system. A comparison between the speaker identification rate including and excluding the silence removal technique shows around 20% increase in identification rate by the application of this proposed algorithm.