World Trade Center - New York City
9-11 Terrorist Attacks
Suicide aircraft attacks on The World Trade Center and the Pentagon left untold numbers injured or dead and threw the cities into chaos on September 11, 2001. It began at the height of a morning rush hour in the nation's largest city. A plane, reportedly a hijacked American Airlines jet, slammed into one tower of the 110-story World Trade Center. As smoke and flames poured out of the building and rescue workers battled to save victims, a second plane hit the second tower. The two towers soon collapsed. Huge clouds of smoke hung over Manhattan. The nearby Wall Street financial markets were shut down. A short time later, another plane struck the Pentagon, touching off a massive explosion and fire, and tearing a hole in one side of the historic building.
President Bush vowed 'terrorism will not stand' and immediately broke off a visit to Florida to return to Washington. Police and military forces all around the country are on alert. Special anti-terrorist units were mobilized in many cities. The United Nations and the Sears Tower in Chicago were also evacuated.
The Trade Center was the target of another terrorist strike eight years ago, a car bomb that damaged the building and caused casualties but did not bring either of the towers down. The attack on the World Trade Center Tuesday was not the first on the 110-story twin towers. In February 1993, a truck bomb exploded there, killing six people, and displacing business in the complex for six months. Six Islamic militants were convicted in the bombing, and sentenced to life in prison. The attack was meant to pressure the United States to stay out of the Middle East and curb its support of Israel.
Until Tuesday's attack, the most serious case of terrorism in the United States occurred in April of 1995, when a truck bomb exploded at a federal government office building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people. Timothy McVeigh was convicted of federal murder charges and executed in June. In a more recent terrorist incident, the US-S Cole was refueling in Yemen's port of Aden in October of last year when a small boat pulled alongside it and detonated explosives, killing 17 US servicemen. US authorities suspect Saudi exile Osama bin Laden was responsible for the incident.
In August of 1998, bombings at the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania killed 224 people. Osama bin Laden is again blamed. In one of the worst cases of terrorism in the air, 270 people were killed when Pan Am 103 (a Boeing 747) exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland, on a flight from London to New York in December 1988.
In Saudi Arabia in June 1996, an attack on the US military complex at Khobar Towers killed 19 Americans. Members of a Saudi militant group were indicted for the attack. Seven months earlier, a car bomb detonated at a US military headquarters in Riyadh, killing five American service personnel.
No comments:
Post a Comment