Shanksville: President Joe Biden commemorated the 20th anniversary of the September 11 attacks on the United States on Saturday with visits to each of the sites where hijacked planes crashed in 2001, honouring the victims of the devastating assault.
Biden began the day in New York, where he and first lady Jill Biden attended a ceremony at the site where the World Trade Centre’s twin towers once stood before planes struck the buildings and caused them to collapse. They then flew to Shanksville, Pennsylvania, and were scheduled to return to the Washington area and visit the Pentagon.
At the World Trade Center site, the New York Police Department pipes and drums band played “Hard Times Come Again No More” a US folk song from the 1850s. Bruce Springsteen, playing an acoustic guitar, sang “I’ll See You in My Dreams”.
The Bidens, with former Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama and former first ladies Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama, shared a moment of silence with the crowd at 8.46 to mark the time that the first plane hit.
Nearly 3,000 people died in the attacks in New York, at the Pentagon and in Pennsylvania, where passengers on United Flight 93 overcame the hijackers and the plane crashed in a field, preventing another target from being hit.
In New York City, on a clear, beautiful day similar to the weather 20 years ago, relatives read a list of the people who died at the towers.
Biden, head bowed, did not make remarks. Rudy Giuliani, the mayor of New York at the time of the attacks, attended the ceremony. Former President Donald Trump, a New York native, did not.
In Shanksville, the Bidens participated in a wreath-laying ceremony at the Flight 93 National Memorial where names of the deceased are etched on a marble wall.
The White House released a taped address in which Biden spoke of the “true sense of national unity” that emerged after the attacks, seen in “heroism everywhere — in places expected and unexpected.”