The United States will fall silent today to mark 16 years since the 9/11 attacks, the deadliest terror strike in the nation’s history.
A total of 2,978 victims and 19 perpetrators died in four separate suicide attacks using hijacked planes, “hurling America into a new consciousness of the threat of global terrorism,” says ABC News.
President Donald Trump will preside over his first commemoration of the atrocity as America’s commander in chief. He and First Lady Melania Trump will observe a moment’s silence at the White House at 8.46am local time (12.46pm), the time the first hijacked plane hit the North Tower. He is also scheduled to attend an official remembrance ceremony at the Pentagon, where the third of four planes hijacked by 19 Al Qaeda terrorists crashed almost an hour later.
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The president has a contentious relationship with the 9/11 attacks. During the election campaign, Trump claimed that “thousands” of Muslims in New Jersey cheered the attacks - “a rumor discredited by police and without any film or audio evidence”, says The Guardian. He also attracted ire for commenting that the destruction of the World Trade Center meant that he once again owned the tallest skyscraper in Manhattan.
Thousands of people are expected to attend a memorial service at the Ground Zero site in Manhattan, which now houses a museum to the tragedy. As has become tradition at the yearly commemoration, each victim’s name will be read aloud.
Vice President Mike Pence is heading to a Shanksville, Pennsylvania for a ceremony paying tribute to the passengers and crew of Flight 93, the last of the four planes to be hijacked and the only one to miss its intended target. It is believed the hijackers intended to crash the jet into either the Capitol building, where Congress sits, or the White House.
However, passengers and crew on the hijacked flight found out about the three other downed planes from contacts on the ground and organised a desperate fightback against their four captors. Audio recordings suggest that the passengers were able to overcome at least one of the hijackers and were battling to access the cockpit when the plane ploughed into a field near Shanksville, 20 minutes short of Washington DC.
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