Ceremony marks 25th anniversary of 1993 World Trade Center bombing
NEW YORK -- Silence at the moment the World Trade Center was bombed 25 years ago has commemorated the terror attack that foreshadowed 9/11. The names of the six people killed on Feb. 26, 1993, including a pregnant woman, were being read at a ceremony at ground zero.
Earlier Monday, a Mass was held at St. Peter's Roman Catholic Church, about a block from the World Trade Center in Manhattan.
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The 12:18 p.m. blast injured more than 1,000 and forced tens of thousands of people to flee the trade center.
The bomb, in an underground parking garage, was set by Muslim extremists who sought to punish the U.S. for its Middle East policies, according to federal prosecutors. Six bombing suspects were convicted and are in prison, including accused ringleader Ramzi Yousef -- a nephew of self-proclaimed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. A seventh suspect in the bombing remains at large.
An estimated 50,000 people fled the blacked-out twin towers, some groping their way down smoky stairs, others rescued from stalled elevators or plucked from rooftops by police helicopters.
Sept. 11 museum president Alice Greenwald says the bombing marked a pivotal moment in the city's history and the nation's reckoning with the threat of international terrorism.
"It had so many of the elements that we would later come to associate with 9/11," she said.
A memorial fountain dedicated to the 1993 bombing was crushed in the attacks that destroyed the towers on Sept. 11, 2001. But bombing victims' names are now inscribed on one of the memorial pools that bear the names of the nearly 3,000 people killed on 9/11.