President’s tears as USA mourns the victims of 9/11
GEORGE W. BUSH broke down in tears as the 20th anniversary of the September 11 terror attacks was marked with solemn acts of remembrance yesterday.
Mr Bush, who was US President at the time of the atrocities, was overcome with emotion at a ceremony in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, where one of the hijacked planes crashed.
As current President Joe Biden sought to use the commemoration to unite his fractured country, in Britain the Queen paid her tribute to the victims by playing the US national anthem outside Windsor Castle. Meanwhile, in a video message, Boris Johnson said that the terrorists ‘failed to shake our belief in freedom and democracy. They failed to drive our nations apart, or cause us to abandon our values, or to live in permanent fear’.
President Biden was joined in
New York by former leaders Barack Obama and Bill Clinton at a ceremony where grieving relatives read out the name of everyone who died when two hijacked planes tore into the World Trade Center.
Mourners also gathered at the Pentagon in Washington DC, where another of the hijacked planes crashed. A total of 2,977 people died, including 67 Britons, in the attacks.
The reading of the names of the dead was punctuated by six-minute silences – two to mark the moments the towers were hit, two to mark the other jets crashing and two to mark when the towers collapsed.
The ceremonies were moments of reflection for a nation bitterly divided over vaccine plans and shaken by the debacle of the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, which the US invaded after 9/11 to hunt down Al Qaeda’s leaders.
In a video address to the nation released before yesterday’s anniversary, Mr Biden pointedly recalled the ‘true sense of national unity’ in the aftermath of 9/11. George W Bush told those gathered in Shanksville of his pride in the ‘amazing, resilient, united’ America he led after the atrocities.
Former President Donald Trump was absent from the official ceremonies but later visited New York to meet firefighters and police. Earlier he attacked the ‘inept’
Biden administration who had ‘surrendered’ in Afghanistan.
A MOSQUE where Manchester bomber Salman Abedi worshipped was firebombed on Friday, police said. The attack on the Didsbury Central Mosque is being investigated as a ‘hate crime’.