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Osama bin Laden was born in 1957 in Riyadh to Hamida al-Attas and Muhammed Awad bin Laden, a wealthy businessman in Saudi Arabia. The
Bin Laden family traces back to the Hadhramaut region of Yemen, while his mother is from Syria. Osama was one of 52 children. Osama's mother, Hamida Ganem al-Attas (Alia), was one of Mohammed bin Laden's fourth wives. Alia was 14 at the time of the marriage, and they had one son together -- Osama, and then they divorced. After the divorce, Hamida married Mohammed al-Attas, who was a mid-level manager in the BinLaden Group. Together they had four children. Osama was raised by his mother and lived together with his four half-siblings. Mohammed provided places for his former wives to stay, so Osama was raised in Medina and the Hijaz, in Saudi Arabia. At some point, Alia, Attas, and Osama moved out of the Bin Laden complex and into a suburban home in Jeddah. As a child, Osama was shy, but he enjoyed activities including swimming, hunting, and horseback riding. Each summer, Alia took the family to Latakia in Syria, where they stayed with relatives. Around age 10, Osama was enrolled at Brummana, a boarding school in Lebanon, but he was there only briefly and returned to Saudi Arabia less than a year later. Osama's father was a distant figure in Osama's live, and his father died in a plane crash when Osama was only 10 years old. Yet, Osama was very much inspired by his father for his achievements
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American Airlines Flight 11 was a scheduled domestic passenger flight in the United States departing from Boston's Logan International Airport to Los Angeles International Airport. The flight was hijacked by a team of five
al-Qaeda terrorists and deliberately crashed into the North Tower of the
World Trade Center in New York City on September 11, 2001. Fifteen minutes into the flight, the hijackers injured at least three people, forcefully breached the cockpit, and overpowered the pilot and first officer.
Mohamed Atta, who was trained as a pilot, took over the controls. Air traffic controllers noticed the flight was in distress when the crew stopped responding to them. They realized the flight had been hijacked when Atta mistakenly transmitted announcements to air traffic control. On board, two flight attendants contacted American Airlines, and provided information about the hijackers and injuries to passengers and crew. The aircraft crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center at 08:46 local time (EDT), with the impact killing all 92 people aboard, including the hijackers. Numerous people in the streets witnessed the collision, and Jules Naudet captured the impact on video. News agencies began to report on the incident soon after and speculated that the crash had been an accident. The impact and subsequent fire caused the North Tower to collapse, which resulted in thousands of additional casualties. During the rescue and recovery effort at the World Trade Center site, workers recovered and identified dozens of remains from Flight 11 victims, but many other body fragments could not be identified.
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7 World Trade Center, located across Vesey Street from the Twin Towers and other World Trade Center buildings, was built in the early-mid 1980s, on top of a two-story Con Edison substation. 7 World Trade Center collapsed at 5:20 pm on September 11, 2001, after suffering extensive damage from fires and falling debris from the collapse of the World Trade Center towers. Soon after September 11, 2001, FEMA initiated a preliminary study into the collapse of the World Trade Center buildings, including 7 World Trade Center. This was followed up by a more extensive investigation by NIST, which is still ongoing. The original Seven World Trade Center was finished in 1987. The original structure had 47 floors and was 570 feet (174 m) tall.[1] Construction began in 1984; in March 1987, the building opened, to become the seventh structure of the World Trade Center. The building was built on top of a Con Edison substation dating from 1967. The substation had a caisson foundation designed to carry the weight of a future building on the site. The final design for 7 World Trade Center was for a building covering a significantly larger footprint than originally planned when the substation was built. Between floors 5 and 7, the building had a system of transfer trusses and girders to transfer load to the smaller-sized foundation. The spray-on fireproofing for structural steel elements was gypsum-based Monokote, which had a 2-hour rating for steel beams, girders and truss, and 3 hour rating for columns. Each floor had 47,000 square feet (4,366 m²) of rentable office space, which made the building's floor plans considerably larger than most other office buildings in the city. In all, 7 World Trade Center had 1,868,000 square feet (174,000 m²) of office space. The building was clad in red exterior masonry. A pedestrian bridge connected it to the main World Trade Center complex, to the south, across Vesey Street. Emery Roth & Sons designed the building.
