September 11 attacks

September 11th, 2001 – a terror attack on New York changes the world. The perpetrators are quickly identified: Mohamed Atta and Ziad Jarrah. They came from Hamburg in Germany. They were students at the University of Technology. Atta is just one of many foreign students when he begins to plan the attacks. Mohamed Atta was just one of those people. And it also had very good educational systems. You know, the school that he went to was a terrific school. So, you know, he could get a good education. It would be free. And it allowed him access to all of Europe. Atta studies town planning. At the beginning, he was an interested young man who didn’t look particularly different. He wasn’t dressed conspicuously, just a normal jacket. Seemed interested and asked questions. He didn’t say very much. In the al-Aqsa Mosque near Hamburg central station, the apparently shy student keeps contact with Islamists. Well, the mosque continued to forge contacts between people. They were probably already radicals. They got together as a group to make an active contribution. Jarrah and Atta plan a trip to an Al-Qaeda training camp. Then they set their sights on their target: New York. It is a dream city for many young people across the world, including Sebastian Gorki from Germany. Of course, we were happy for him. We knew that it’s the greatest thing for a young banker to be in New York. In the center of the financial world. Can’t it be London, that is a bit closer, or perhaps Milan, or Zurich, or somewhere else? But this was the chance he got, and New York is New York. Sebastian Gorki is in the south tower of the World Trade Center when these pictures are taken on 11th September 2001. I was getting a sound bite, was asking a witness, when the first building collapsed behind me. It was unbelievably loud, as if another airplane had crashed into it. And suddenly, within seconds, we were all covered in burning smoke and ashes. And we just ran for our lives. It is a new dimension of terror. I remember gesticulating wildly. And that I couldn’t believe it. And I remember thinking: How can I put this horror into words? I can’t. More than 17,000 manage to escape. We were clinging on to hope. In one picture, I see Sebastian running away. That he was in the office, but that he was already downstairs and could get away, or something like that. The collapse of the towers buries those last hopes. Almost 3000 die. The monuments of the western financial world become reminders of terror. Sebastian Gorki’s parents visit the memorial because there is no grave for their son.