Obama's 9/11 trip

United States President Barack Obama said in New York on Thursday that Osama bin Laden's death showed the US does not forget and will never fail to bring terrorists to justice.

It was the US president's first visit since taking office to New York's Ground Zero, the site of the World Trade Center, destroyed in the September 11, 2001 attacks on the US.

Obama laid a wreath of red, white and blue flowers at the site and then bowed his head to observe a moment of silence.

"When we say we will never forget, we mean what we say," Obama said earlier to a group of firefighters who lost 15 men in the rescue effort after two hijacked planes were flown into the Twin Towers.

"Our commitment to making sure that justice is done is something that transcended politics, transcended party; it didn't matter which administration was in, it didn't matter who was in charge. We were going to make sure that the perpetrators of that horrible act - that they received justice."

Meeting with SEAL Team 6

Obama is set to meet Friday with the Navy SEAL Team 6 that carried out the mission and killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan on Sunday.

He praised the elite team of operatives on Thursday by telling New York firefighters that carried out their mission "in the name of your brothers that were lost."

Osama bin Laden, the leader and founder of the al Qaeda terror group, became the symbolic figure behind the September 11 attacks. The ongoing 'war on terror' was effectively a global manhunt for bin Laden, starting with the US led invasion of Afghanistan, which quickly snowballed.

Nearly 3,000 people were killed in the September 11 attacks, after two hijacked passenger planes flew into the World Trade Center towers. Another plane crashed into the Pentagon - the headquarters of the United States Department of Defense in Arlington County, Virginia - and a fourth crashed in a field in Pennsylvania after passengers overpowered their hijackers.

Author: Mark Hallam (AFP, AP, dpa)
Editor: Rob Turner