New York is marking 25 years since the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks with a memorial ceremony in Lower Manhattan, where families of victims and former US presidents are expected to gather to remember those who lost their lives.
President Donald Trump will not attend the ceremony in New York, instead travelling to the Pentagon to pay tribute to victims of the attacks. The World Trade Center site was where most of the 2,977 people killed on September 11 lost their lives.
Vice President JD Vance and Trump’s four living predecessors — George W. Bush, who was president when the attacks occurred, alongside Joe Biden, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton — are expected at Ground Zero.
The memorial ceremony will not feature speeches. Instead, relatives of those killed will read the names of the victims, while bells will be rung at significant moments marking the sequence of events that unfolded that day.
“Memorials like this and discussions about those events are an important part of keeping it alive and understanding how we prevent tragedies like this from ever happening again,” said Robert Kafka, a Chicago man in his 60s visiting the 9/11 Memorial.
Mamdani’s Attendance Draws Controversy
Democratic Mayor Zohran Mamdani, New York City’s first Muslim mayor, is also expected to attend the ceremony alongside the former presidents.
His participation has sparked opposition from sections of the political right, with the New York Post and former mayor Rudy Giuliani backing a campaign calling for him to stay away from the anniversary event.
A petition with more than 100,000 signatures accused Mamdani of associating with unspecified individuals who were allegedly “dismissive of American institutions or insufficiently critical of extremist ideologies.”
City Council member Shahana Hanif criticised the campaign against Mamdani, saying his religion appeared to be influencing how his attendance was being viewed.
“It’s concerning to me that the mayor is being treated differently simply because he is Muslim,” Hanif told CNN.
Mamdani has nevertheless received praise for recently releasing thousands of documents detailing what city officials knew about air toxicity in Lower Manhattan after the attacks.
The collapse of the World Trade Center generated an enormous dust cloud, followed by months of polluted air and lingering debris. Thousands of people exposed to the conditions later developed illnesses, including cancer.
“People got sick because the leaders they trusted lied and told them they were safe to breathe in toxic air,” Mamdani said Tuesday.
Remembering the 2001 Attacks
The September 11 attacks were carried out by 19 Al-Qaeda operatives who hijacked four commercial planes.
Two aircraft were deliberately flown into the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers, causing the 110-storey buildings to collapse.
Another hijacked plane struck the Pentagon, while the fourth crashed into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, after passengers attempted to regain control of the aircraft.
The attacks killed 2,977 people on September 11. More than 9,400 additional people have since died from illnesses linked to exposure and other consequences of the attacks, according to the federal programme established to provide medical care to affected individuals.
A large portion of the US population has no personal memory of the attacks, with about 100 million Americans either born afterward or too young to remember the events.
Logan Miller, 32, lost his uncle in the attacks and later lost his grandfather to an illness linked to 9/11.
“I think the next generation just can’t fathom what actually transpired and how someone could be impacted by that, and so I actually find them asking more questions,” he told AFP.
Security Tightened Around Memorial Site
Large crowds are expected in Lower Manhattan for the anniversary ceremony, prompting authorities to impose extensive security measures around the 9/11 Memorial and Museum.
The US Secret Service has established a heavily secured perimeter around the site, while New York Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch said an anti-drone team would be deployed as a precaution.
Tisch stressed, however, that authorities had not received intelligence indicating a specific threat against the gathering.
Meanwhile, Al-Qaeda marked the anniversary by releasing a video containing images of its late leader Osama bin Laden and his son Hamza, who Trump said in 2019 had also been killed.
Before the memorial ceremony, New York Harbor hosted a drone display featuring 2,977 lights, with each light representing one of the people killed in the September 11 attacks.
Source: AFP
