2023-09-11 20:39:21
The United States began Monday (11) paying tribute to the almost 3,000 people killed in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the worst in the country’s history, organized by the radical extremists of Al-Qaeda in New York, near Washington and in Pennsylvania.
Published on: 11/09/2023 – 20:39
3 min
Vice President Kamala Harris and the current and former mayors of New York met with the crowd near the imposing memorial to the victims in lower Manhattan. There was a minute of silence to mark the exact moments when four planes hijacked by Islamic commandos crashed, and when the two towers of the World Trade Center (WTC) collapsed in a cloud of steel and dust.
American President Joe Biden is expected to speak in Anchorage, Alaska, upon returning from a trip to Vietnam.
As happens every year on this date, the names of the 2,753 people who died in the twin towers were read for three or four hours by members of their families, including teenagers who had not yet been born on that disastrous September 11, 2001.
“I really wish I had met you. Every one of us in the family misses you. We will never forget”, whispered the grandson of firefighter Allan Tarasiewicz, who died, among 342 other firefighters, when intervening in the WTC towers.
At the Pentagon, near the federal capital, Washington, where an al-Qaeda commando flew a plane into part of the Defense Department building, the Navy sounded a ship’s siren to honor the 184 dead.
Similarly, in Pennsylvania, sirens sounded for the fourth plane crash, which killed 40 passengers and crew.
“A nation at war”
“9/11 made America a nation at war and hundreds of thousands of people were mobilized to serve our country in uniform,” said Defense Minister Lloyd Austin, referring to the two wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, launched in October 2001 and March 2003 by then-president George W. Bush.
The September 11 attacks left a total of 2,977 dead (including 2,753 at the WTC) and almost 6,300 injured, according to an official report.
On Friday, New York forensics reported that a woman and a man killed in the twin towers could be identified using DNA, bringing the number of people identified in the towers to 1,649. The names were not revealed at the request of the families.
When the South Tower and then the North Tower of the World Trade Center collapsed after the attack, the violence of the fire, steel and dust was such that no trace of DNA from the hundreds of dead was found. The two new identifications were made possible thanks to “recently adopted next-generation sequencing technology – more sensitive and faster than conventional DNA techniques” and used especially by the US military, explains the New York Medical Examiner’s Office (OCME , in its acronym in English).
There are still 1,104 unidentified victims of jihadist attacks.
(With information from AFP)
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