The 25 most shocking images of the Twin Towers attack on September 11

The United States commemorates this Saturday the 20th anniversary the worst attacks in its history with the president Joe biden weakened by the chaotic end of the war in Afghanistan, launched in retaliation for the Al Qaeda attacks that rocked the world.

Twenty years later, emotions are still high in a country shocked by the terrorist attacks. September 11, 2001. That morning, 19 terrorists, mostly Saudi, members of the organization Al Qaeda, hijacked four commercial airliners and crashed them Torres twins of new York, the Pentagon on the outskirts of Washington, while a fourth, allegedly directed against Congress, fell in a field in Pennsylvania.

Pain is still alive in the families of the missing: “I have a feeling this just happened,” says Monica Iken-Murphy, a 37-year-old widow of a stockbroker who worked on the 84th floor of the South Tower. .

President Biden and his wife Jill are expected in New York to participate in the tribute ceremony, during which, like every year, The names of the 2,977 people who died in the attacks will be read.

The presidential couple, who will be joined by other former presidents at the event, will later travel to Pennsylvania and the Pentagon where they will also pay tribute to the victims and lay wreaths. The president has no plans to deliver a speech.

Manhattan’s so-called Ground Zero, where the Twin Towers once stood, has become a place of pilgrimage and tribute to the deceased. The two buildings were replaced by a monument, a huge fountain in the shape of a basin whose walls function like gentle waterfalls and are inscribed with the names of 2,753 New York victims.

On the one hand, in the memorial museum of 11S, a piece of staircase is on display through which some of those who miraculously survived were able to escape, pieces of the building wall turned into a mass of rubble, steel beams twisted by the heat of the blaze that caused the impact of the planes loaded with fuel, photographs of the victims and the reconstruction with images of what was that frenzied day that more than 2 billion people around the world glued to their television, on the radio or on computer screens.

Over the next two decades, a new skyscraper was erected in Manhattan to replace the Torres twins. Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden has been assassinated.

JD / CP