TANIA HEAD

THE world will never forget the chilling images of September 11, 2001, when New York’s World Trade Center towers crumbled into oblivion after planes hijacked by terrorists hurtled into them.

The tales of witnesses were vivid and heart-breaking.

One of the most amazing was that of Tania Head, her account making her one of only 19 survivors who had been at or above the points of impact when the two planes hit.

Head’s story deeply moved the World Trade Center Survivors’ Network, of which she became president.

She also led mournful tour groups around “Ground Zero”, telling them: “I was in the South Tower when I saw a plane about 113 feet away. It hit the North Tower. I saw people begin to jump from the building…”

After the second plane hit her own tower, she described struggling to a stairway “while everybody around me was dying – I crawled through blood and body parts”.

Saved by a firefighter, she said she awoke in hospital five days later to learn her fiancé working in the North Tower had not survived.

Head’s story made headlines worldwide. It took six more years before anyone dared suggest that the tale she’d told was untrue.

Harvard and Stanford universities, where she said she had studied, could find no record of her. Merrill Lynch, the bank she said she worked for, did not know her. The family of her supposed fiancé had never heard of her. And the charity she said she had established in his memory did not exist.

The fake heroine of 9/11 was exposed in 2007 as Alicia Esteve, a Spanish secretary. She was not the daughter of an international diplomat, as she had claimed, and had been in Barcelona studying for a master’s degree in business when the attacks happened.

New York Mayor at the time, Rudy Giuliani, met Tania on a number of occasions and later said: “Never in my wildest dreams would I have ever thought any part of her story wasn’t true.”

Trauma therapist Janice Cilento said: “She has stolen my time and my soul.”