US Correspondent Logan Church met the wife of a 9/11 victim, who’s been fighting for accountability for years. A fight, she said as the country prepared to mark the 25-year anniversary, is far from over.
Across the road from Ground Zero, where New York’s Twin Towers once proudly stood, Terry Strada places thousands of pages of documents on a table.
She is one of thousands of Americans who lost a loved one on September 11, 2001, when four planes were hijacked. Two of them hit the Twin Towers, one hit the Pentagon, and another was downed in a field after the passengers wrestled for control.
US recalls the horror of four passenger planes hijacked and aimed at strategic targets on September 11, 2001. (Source: 1News)
It remains the worst terrorist attack in modern history, by death count, scope, fallout – whatever the metric.
Terry lost her husband Tom that day. He worked in a financial services firm in the North Tower. He was planning on leaving early as they had an infant at home, along with children aged seven and four.
“He called after the plane had hit the building,” she told me. “He was one of the few people that was able to get a phone call out.”
Terry said that phone call brought her straight into the horror her husband was dealing with.
“He was with a group of friends, and they were going to go to the stairwell and try to get out. They didn't know at that time that the stairwells were all gone and that there was no opportunity for anyone to escape above where the plane hit in the North Tower. The same happened in the South Tower, above the impact zone. Nobody survived.”
In the years since, Terry was just one of many who believed there was more behind the attacks.
Al-Qaeda, led by Osama Bin-Laden, claimed responsibility. But Terry's group, 911 Families United, believe there were powerful figures who backed them - and had escaped accountability.
“Like any murder case, if your family member is murdered, you want accountability, you want justice, you want to put that person behind bars for the rest of their lives," she said.
"But we didn't have that opportunity because there were 19 bad guys and they were gone. But we could hold the state that was responsible, the state sponsor of the attacks in a US courtroom in a civil litigation.”
They say that state was Saudi Arabia – 15 of the 19 terrorists were Saudi nationals. They claim another Saudi, Omar al-Bayoumi, aided two of attacks and had extensive links to the Saudi government.
Saudi Arabia has always denied any involvement, and the United States says the nation wasn’t complicit.
Al-Bayoumi has maintained his innocence as well.
Nevertheless, these allegations forms part of a years'-long lawsuit brought by Terry's 911 Families United. The thousands of pages, files, and folders sitting beside her at this event we spoke at represented only some of the evidence they had and would present in court, she said.
It was a case she said Saudi Arabia had spent vast resources fighting – although they were due back in court next month.
“We want to achieve accountability and somebody to take responsibility for this, but also, that the whole entire truth is finally out in the open so that we can better protect ourselves going forward. That's really what this is about,” she said.
“The heart of it is to deter future terrorist attacks on America's soil. So you have to have the truth. You have to know everything about it. We have to get the history books correct. Right now, they're not telling the full story, and that is a detriment to our national security.”
Terry, and other victims’ family members, were invited to a closed ceremony, where the names of all those who died at the World Trade Centre were read out loud.
It’s a number that grows with alarming regularity as many of the first responders suffer long term health complications.
Just this week, New York’s Mayor Zohran Mamdani released a trove of documents revealing the city misled New Yorkers about how safe the air was to breathe near where the Twin Towers collapsed.
Despite Terry's mission to advocate for accountability, the anniversary of 911 is a trying time.
“The phone call [my husband] made, I say, is both a blessing and a curse – a blessing because he got to talk to me, but a curse because that's what I have to live with now for the rest of my life," she said.
"I was brought onto the floor where the horror was happening, you know, the screaming and the fear that I could hear,” she said.
“It's hard to do the anniversary. It's always kind of good when it gets behind us.”
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