The 9/11 Memorial site will open to the public today for the first time since the attacks on New York 10 years ago.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the September 11 Memorial and Museum president Joe Daniels will officially open the plaza, alongside the site’s architects Michael Arad and Peter Walker.
They will be joined by 9/11 Memorial board members who are relatives of victims.
Some 400,000 people have registered to visit the memorial so far. The museum is still under construction and will open next year.
On the tenth anniversary of the September 11 attacks, family members were invited to view the memorial.
The names of their loved ones are inscribed in bronze around the edges of pools marking where the twin towers once stood.
Debra Burlingame, whose brother was one of the pilots of the plane that crashed into the Pentagon, said: “I have never felt that 9/11 – or any of the sacred ground where my brother and the other victims were killed – belongs to the families [of victims] and the families alone.
“I’ve always felt that the entire country was attacked that day. The locus of the attacks was Pennsylvania, Virginia and New York but this was an attack on the entire country and the entire country felt attacked.
“The American people were pretty magnificent that day and I feel they own this as much as we do.”
Speaking at an evening concert in Washington that closed the day of memorial observances, President Barack Obama said much had changed for Americans in the past 10 years.
“We can never get back the lives we lost on that day, or the Americans who made the ultimate sacrifice in the wars that followed,” Mr Obama said.
“Yet today, it is worth remembering what has not changed. Our character as a nation has not changed.”
Earlier in the day, the US President attended the main anniversary ceremony in New York.
He was joined by former President George W Bush as they listened to the names of the 2,983 victims who died in the attacks a decade ago, as well as those who were killed in the 1993 truck bomb at the World Trade Centre.
President Obama then travelled on to the new memorial to flight 93 in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, before laying a wreath at the Pentagon.
At the British Garden in downtown Manhattan, a ceremony was held to honour the 67 people from the UK who died on 9/11.
In Chicago on the first day of the NFL American football season, first responders who were sent to New York to help after the attacks pulled a huge flag across Soldier Field to honour the sacrifices made by the FDNY and the NYPD.
NYPD police chief Ray Kelly told Sky News Online that 23 officers from the force died that day, and said it is vital the city maintains its commitment to “never forget”.
He said the security operation to combat the specific credible terror threat against New York had gone “pretty smoothly”, adding that it had cost a lot of money but was “absolutely necessary” to keep New Yorkers safe.
Late last night, two beams of light shone up from the 9/11 memorial site at the site of the original twin towers, an annual event called “Tribute In Light”.
Source : Sky News
