USA: Five years on, Americans mark 9/11 attacks
- 00:01:10
- ITN Source
USA: Five years on, Americans mark 9/11 attacks
Americans stood in silence and world leaders paid their respects on Monday (September 11), five years after hijackers crashed airliners into Washington and New York icons of U.S. finance and government in the deadliest attack in U.S. history. From the urban landscape of Manhattan to the Pentagon and a rural Pennsylvania field, tearful ceremonies remembered the victims and revived traumatic memories of the day. Politicians laid wreaths and bagpipes played mournful tunes. Bush's last stop of September 11th sites was a wreath laying ceremony at the Pentagon. Earlier President Bush and First Lady Laura Bush stood at New York's Fort Pitt firehouse and bowed their heads for two moments of silence, first at 8:46 a.m. EDT (1246 GMT), the moment a plane flew into the north tower, and again at 9:03 a.m. EDT (1303 GMT), when the south tower was hit. They proceeded to Shanksville, Pennsylvania, for a wreath-laying ceremony on the placid countryside where hijacked United Flight 93 slammed into the ground after a passenger revolt apparently stopped the plane from attacking Washington. Forty passengers and crew were killed. Jarring images of the day - smoke billowing from the towers, New Yorkers crying in the streets, debris falling from the darkened sky - dominated U.S. television and newspapers. At Ground Zero, where the 110-story twin towers pancaked to the ground, New York police and firefighters marched down a ramp into the pit for a flag-waving ceremony on a day of crisp, clear blue skies, eerily similar to Sept. 11 five years ago. Spouses and partners of victims read out the names of all 2,749 people who died at the World Trade Center. At the United Nations, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said the Sept. 11 attacks inflicted a "gaping wound" on New York and reminded the world that terrorism was unacceptable, no matter who commits it.
ITN Source | September 12, 2006
