(Reuters) — An overcast Friday (September 11) greeted relatives who gathered at the World Trade Center site to commemorate nearly 3,000 people killed in the Sept. 11 attacks in New York, Pennsylvania and outside Washington 14 years ago, when airliners hijacked by al Qaeda militants brought death, mayhem and destruction.
Relatives of the victims read their names in a solemn and poignantly familiar pattern. Emblematic of the generations affected, children who were not old enough to remember their late relatives or had yet to meet them participated in the roll call.
They stood at the empty footprint of the World Trade Center Twin Towers, toppled by two hijacked airliners on that clear, sunny morning in 2001.
Hijackers crashed two other commercial jets into the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia and into a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
The New York ceremony, where politicians past and present mixed with families but gave no speeches, was punctuated by bell ringings and moments of silence to mark the times when each of the four planes crashed and the towers fell.
The buzz of increased commerce from new residential and business towers has returned a large degree of normalcy to the area, known after the attacks as Ground Zero.
The day also honors those who were killed in 1993, when a car bomb tore through one of the parking garages of one of the towers.
Next to the 16-acre (6.5-hectare) site where the Twin Towers stood is the newly opened 1 World Trade Center, the tallest skyscraper in the Western hemisphere.
The first plane slammed into the North tower at 8:46 a.m., followed by a second plane hitting the South tower at 9:03 a.m. Within two hours, both towers had collapsed, engulfing lower Manhattan in acrid dust and smoke and debris that burned for days.