Ten years on from 11 September, questions about the fateful day still remain unanswered.
“When I saw the second plane – indicating that it was a terrorist act – I immediately thought it was al-Qaeda, as I had been working on that issue for a number of weeks,” recalled Xavier Colin, a TV producer-journalist with the French-language RTS public station.“But no one imagined other attacks of such magnitude and on American soil.”
For Jacques Baud, a Swiss security expert, who now works for the United Nations in New York, the deadly attacks were completely unpredictable.
“Those people who said they had predicted what happened never predicted anything. There were theories and hypotheses, but they were nothing,” he said.
“Thirty years ago when I was working in intelligence there was talk of the possibility of a plane crashing into a nuclear plant or the Pentagon. But intelligence is about communicating precise evidence.”
The official US 9/11 Commission Report on the events leading up to the attacks was published on July 22, 2004. But conspiracy theories have continued to evolve, especially on the internet and in books and to a lesser extent in the press.
