America remembers 9/11 under specter of Bin Laden

NEW YORK: America commemorated six years since the September 11 attacks on Tuesday with solemn ceremonies but under the specter of Osama bin Laden, who used the anniversary to praise the Al-Qaeda hijackers.

Families of the 2,749 people killed when two passenger planes plowed into New York's World Trade Center paid their respects at the site, where rescue workers read out the names of the dead in what has now become an annual ritual.

But unlike in past years, most of the ceremony was being held at a park near Ground Zero, the area where the Twin Towers once stood, and not on the site, where a memorial and other new buildings are being constructed.

The ceremony is more muted than in past years. Last year, President George W Bush visited New York to lay a wreath at the site, but this year attended a private service and observed a moment of silence in Washington.

In Shanksville, Pennsylvania, where hijackers brought down United Airlines Flight 93 in a field after a passenger uprising, tributes were to be held later today to honour the 40 passengers and crew killed there.

In Washington, Defense Secretary Robert Gates was to lead a memorial ceremony for the 18 people who were killed when American Airlines Flight 77 flew into the Pentagon.

As in previous years, Bin Laden used the anniversary to release two video tapes, mocking the United States, threatening to escalate the increasingly unpopular war in Iraq and praising hijacker Walid al-Shehri as a "champion."

Shehri was on American Airlines Flight 11, the first jet to crash into the World Trade Center in New York.

The hijacker was "a young man who personally penetrated the most extreme degrees of danger and is a rarity among men: one of the 19 champions," a US-based monitoring group that obtained the video quoted Bin Laden as saying.

In a reminder of the reality of the post-September 11 age, Turkish police defused powerful bomb hidden under a bus in central Ankara, while security was tightened at US military base in Germany in response to a bomb threat.

In an overcast New York, the reading of the names was to pause for four moments of silence to mark the exact times that the planes hit the towers and when the massive buildings collapsed into piles of rubble and dust.

A choir and pipers introduced the ceremony and a bell tolled at the first moment of silence at 8:46 am (1246 GM) to mark the moment that Flight 11 crashed into the North Tower.

Speaking immediately ahead of the first moment of silence, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg described the day of the attacks six years ago as "a day that tore across our history and our hearts."

Relatives of those killed were then to descend a long ramp into the World Trade Center site to lay flowers and pause momentarily. The decision not to hold the ceremony at Ground Zero itself has stirred controversy.

But Bloomberg justified the decision again today, saying people needed to accept the change.

"The place where we used to hold this ceremony is now a construction site. This is probably the last year people will be able to walk down the ramp into the pit," Bloomberg told CNN ahead of the ceremony.

His predecessor, Republican presidential hopeful Rudolph Giuliani, was also due to give a reading, sparking criticism from some of the families of those killed, given his presidential ambitions.