The 11 September 2001 attacks killed almost 3,000 people in New York, the Washington DC area and Pennsylvania.

 

In New York, families of the victims read the names of each person who died at the World Trade Center.

 

President Barack Obama honoured the dead at a memorial ceremony outside the Pentagon.

 

"We pray for the memory of all those taken from us... Our hearts still ache for the futures¹ snatched² away, the lives that might have been," he said.

 

The attacks led to a long war in Afghanistan and created an expansion of government surveillance powers that have recently been the subject of intense debate.

 

A separate memorial service was held outside Shanksville, Pennsylvania, honouring the passengers and crew of United Flight 93. They struggled with the hijackers of the plane, preventing it from hitting its intended target, believed to be the White House or the US Capitol building.

 

All 33 passengers and seven crew members on the flight were killed after the plane crashed into a field about 75 miles (120km) south-east of Pittsburgh.

 

"No matter how many years pass, this time comes around each year, and it's always the same," Karen Hinson, who lost her brother, Michael Wittenstein, in New York, told the Associated Press news agency. His body was never found.

 

More than 1,000 people gathered on Wednesday at the National September 11 memorial plaza³ in New York City to read the names of all those killed in the 2001 and 1993 attacks on the building.

 

Bagpipes⁴ and a youth choir⁵ began the proceedings⁶, held around two reflecting pools that stand in the footprint of the destroyed towers.

 

"To my nephew Michael Joseph Mullin, we miss you and think of you every single day," said one of the 250 people chosen to read names, many of them family members of the victims.

 

"You're gone but not forgotten," another woman said of her lost cousin.

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