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Timeline: The September 11 terrorist attacks

The day that defined the beginning of the 21st Century for Americans

On September 11, 2001, 2,977 people were killed in the deadliest terrorist attacks in American history.

The moment shocked the nation. Two planes, hijacked by Islamic jihadists vowing death to all Americans, plowed into both towers at the World Trade Center in New York. Another plane was flown into the Pentagon in Washington, DC. A fourth plane, presumably headed for the White House or the U.S. Capitol, was heroically diverted by passengers and ended up crashing in an empty field in Pennsylvania. After reports of the first plane hitting the North Tower, millions watched the second plane hit the South Tower on live television.

It was a terrifying, startling, and humbling event for the country. The 9/11 attacks were the deadliest on American soil since the shock attack at Pearl Harbor 60 years before, and the sense of outrage was reminiscent of that moment. The attacks in New York occurred in the country’s busiest city on a busy workday. And the staggered nature of the attacks meant that news footage captured almost everything as it happened, ensuring that millions of Americans saw the events precisely as they unfolded.

September 11, 2001

5:45 AM – Mohamed Atta and Abdul Aziz al-Omari, two of the intended hijackers, pass through security at the Portland International Jetport in Maine. They board a commuter flight to Boston Logan International Airport, they then board American Airlines Flight 11 .

7:59 AM – Flight 11 takes off from Boston, headed for Los Angeles, California. There are 76 passengers, 11 crew members, and 5 hijackers on board.

8:15 AM – United Airlines Flight 175 takes off from Boston, also headed for Los Angeles. There are 51 passengers, 9 crew members, and 5 hijackers on board.

8:19 AM – A flight attendant on Flight 11 , Betty Ann Ong, alerts ground personnel that a hijacking is underway and that the cockpit is unreachable.

8:20 AM – American Airlines Flight 77 takes off from Dulles, outside of Washington, DC, headed for Los Angeles. There are 53 passengers, 6 crew members, and 5 hijackers on board.

8:24 AM – Mohamed Atta, a hijacker on Flight 11 , unintentionally alerts air controllers in Boston to the attack. He meant to press the button that allowed him to talk to the passengers on his flight.

8:37 AM – After hearing the broadcast from Atta on Flight 11 , Boston air traffic control alerts the US Air Force’s Northeast Defense Sector, who then mobilize the Air National Guard to follow the plane.

8:42 AM – United Flight 93 takes off from Newark, New Jersey, after a delay due to routine traffic. It was headed for San Francisco, California. There are 33 passengers, 7 crew members, and 4 hijackers are on board.

8:46 AM – Flight 11 crashes into the World Trade Center’s North Tower. All passengers aboard are instantly killed, and employees of the WTC are trapped above the 91 st floor.

9:03 AM – Flight 175 crashes into the WTC’s South Tower. All passengers aboard are killed instantly and so are an unknown number of people in the tower.

9:05 AM – President George W. Bush, in an elementary school classroom in Florida, is informed about the hit on the second tower. His chief of staff, Andrew Card, whispers the chilling news into the president’s ear. Bush later wrote about his response: “I made the decision not to jump up immediately and leave the classroom. I didn’t want to rattle the kids. I wanted to project a sense of calm… I had been in enough crises to know that the first thing the leader has to do is to project calm.” ( Miller Center )

9:28 AM – Hijackers attack on Flight 93 .

9:37 AM – Flight 77 crashes into the Pentagon. All passengers aboard are instantly killed and so are 125 civilian and military personnel in the building.

9:45 AM – US airspace is shut down under Operation Yellow Ribbon. All civilian aircraft are ordered to land at the nearest airport.

9:55 AM – Air Force One with President George W. Bush aboard takes off from Florida.

9:57 AM – Passengers aboard Flight 93 begin to run up toward the cockpit. Jarrah, the pilot, begins to roll the plane back and forth in an attempt to destabilize the revolt.

9:59 AM – The South Tower of the World Trade Center collapses.

10:02 AM – Flight 93 plows into an empty field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Although its ultimate target is unknown, it was likely heading for either the White House or the US Capitol.

10:18 AM – President Bush authorizes any non-grounded planes to be shot down. At that time, all four hijacked planes had already crashed but the president’s team was operating under the impression that Flight 93 was still in the air.

10:28 AM – The North Tower of the World Trade Center collapses.

10:53 AM – Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld orders the US military to move to a higher state of alert, going to DEFCON 3.

11:45 AM – Air Force 1 lands at Barksdale Air Force Base near Shreveport, Louisiana.

12:15 PM – Airspace in the United States is completely free of all commercial and private flights.

1:30 PM – Air Force 1 leaves Barksdale.

2:30 PM – Rudy Giuliani, the mayor of New York City, visits the fallen Twin Towers of the World Trade Center at what becomes known as Ground Zero.

3:00 PM – Air Force 1 lands at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska, and President Bush is immediately taken to a secure bunker that is capable of withstanding a nuclear attack.

4:30 PM – Air Force 1 leaves Offutt and heads back toward Andrews Air Force base near Washington, DC.

5:30 PM – Building 7 of the World Trade Center collapses.

8:30 PM – President Bush addresses the nation.

Although to many Americans 9/11 seemed like a random act of terror, the roots of the event had been developing for years. A combination of factors that coalesced in the late 1990s led the catastrophic event. These factors included regional conditions in the Middle East that motivated the perpetrators, as well as intelligence lapses and failures that  left the United States vulnerable.

Osama Bin Laden was relatively unknown in the United States before 9/11, even as he was amassing popularity, followers, and fame in the Middle East during the 1990s. In 1988, he was one of the founders of al Qaeda, a militant Islamic terrorist organization that organized and carried out the 9/11 attacks. Bin Laden called for indiscriminate killing of all Americans who, he claimed, were “the worst thieves in the world today” (9/11 Report, page 47). It was the perfect historical moment for that rallying cry.

Throughout the 20th century, a wave of secular, nationalist revolutions swept through the Middle East, taking root in Egypt, Libya, Iraq, Yemen, and other countries. While these movements were awash in promising ideology, the new regimes quickly became autocratic and suppressed dissent. Their critics turned to violent revolution to express their dissatisfaction with the secular governments.

At the same time, social malaise, especially among young men who were struggling to find decent jobs and start their own families in corrupt oil states, provided easy targets for radicalization. Bin Laden’s message that America was the “head of the snake” and the root of all society’s problems resonated well with the discontent.

By the mid-1990s, Bin Laden was the head of al Qaeda, a multifaceted and highly developed terrorist network carrying out attack after attack on Americans in the Middle East. It was a new type of terrorism to which the US intelligence agencies struggled to adapt. Much of the intelligence community had not even imaged the specific type of hijacking and terrorism carried out on 9/11. They were preparing for threats such as the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center and bombing in 2000 of the USS Cole .

Much of the intelligence community’s focus was on reactive law enforcement activity rather than proactive countering of terrorism. A telling quote from the 9/11 commission report focuses on the lack of a proactive response: “The process was meant, by its nature, to mark for the public as the events finished – case solved, justice done. It was not designed to ask if the events might be harbingers of worse to come. Nor did it allow for aggregating and analyzing facts to see if they could provide clues to terrorist tactics more generally – methods of entry and finance, and mode of operation inside the United States” (Commission Report, p. 73).

Bin Laden had amassed substantial power due to conditions in the Middle East as well as his charismatic leadership, and the US intelligence community was underprepared for a 9/11 style attack. In the aftermath of 9/11, these two factors continued to affect US policy in the Middle East, particularly in Iraq.

The immediate response to 9/11 was the George W. Bush administration’s War on Terror, which began in Afghanistan as a retaliation against al Qaeda for carrying out the attack. The Bush administration soon expanded the War on Terror into Iraq, and the consequences of these wars continue to affect the Middle East to this day. Almost 20 years later, the United States is still at war in both Afghanistan and Iraq.

There were domestic long-term effects of 9/11 as well. Thousands of people struggle with cancer and lasting chronic health problems relating to the toxicity from Ground Zero, the site where the Twin Towers used to stand. The September 11 attacks also changed American air travel as airlines began to require stringent security checks designed to prevent the types of weapons the hijackers used from slipping through.

Finally, the 9/11 attacks resulted in changes to the federal government and an expansion of executive power. A new cabinet department, the Department of Homeland Security, was created, and the intelligence community was consolidated under the Director of National Intelligence to improve coordination between various agencies and departments. New legislation such as the USA Patriot Act expanded domestic security and surveillance, disrupted terrorist funding by cracking down on activities such as money laundering, and increased efficiency within the U.S. intelligence community.

The tragedy of September 11, 2001 will never be forgotten, and the aftermath is still continuing to unfold. The 9/11 Memorial and Museum opened on the site of the former World Trade Center on September 11, 2011, and features reflecting pools in the footprints of where the Twin Towers once stood.

Katherine Huiskes

Katherine Huiskes is a member of UVA's class of 2021, where she studied foreign affairs and history, with a particular interest in policymaking, cybersecurity, and military budgeting.

More on the presidency of George W. Bush

Read the 9/11 commission report, click here to read the report, more about the september 11 attacks, the road to 9/11, the road from 9/11, lessons learned from september 11, the roots of september 11: america and afghanistan, world politics after september 11: a clash of civilizations.

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How 9/11 changed travel forever

The attacks may have sparked a new era of tightened security for tourists and left new york city swept clean of its beloved visitors - but the city’s resilience is as strong as ever, writes sunshine flint, article bookmarked.

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G one were the Gothic arches at the base of the towers that echoed the ones in stone on the Brooklyn Bridge; gone was the steel tracery that drew a bow across the bridge’s soaring strings from the tip of Manhattan – a favourite tableau for snap-happy tourists, until that day. Gone were the red carpets in the lobbies where visitors took express lifts to the Top of the World observatory on the 107th floor of the south tower, or to a glamorous lunch at Windows on the World in the north tower, a restaurant so lofty that diners gazed at the curve of the earth from their table. The mourning was for the lives lost, of course, not for a tourist destination. But the destruction of these icons created a massive shock that was felt around the world.

In the immediate aftermath, that shock generated a massive change across all aspects of travel, most obviously seen in aviation and airport security. August 2001 had seen a record high of 65.4 million airline passengers. It took nearly three years for air travel to rebound, with that number being surpassed only in July 2004. Those passengers faced a very different experience from what the flying public had known before. Immediately, security lines at the airport became hours long, while the creation of the Transportation Security Administration in the US codified a way of flying that is now the norm.

Travellers today doff their shoes and jackets at security, pack no more than 100ml of liquid in their carry-ons, endure invasive pat-downs and enhanced body-scanners, all as a matter of course. Surveillance and tight visa restrictions are de rigueur, and international passengers flying into JFK and other US airports have their fingerprints placed on file and are subjected to more questioning by customs and immigration agents. Air travel was transformed, practically overnight, into something frustration-filled and complicated.

Meanwhile, in New York, nearly every institution, sporting event and cultural site had to rethink its security operations, from installing metal detectors and using bomb-sniffing dogs to banning water bottles. Some, like the Statue of Liberty, closed for years, while others, like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, reopened almost immediately, directed by the city to be open as a place of solace to New Yorkers.

“We reopened on the Thursday morning,” says John Barelli, chief security officer at the museum from 1986 to 2015 and author of Stealing the Show: A History of Art and Crime in Six Thefts. “We always had enough staff covering our entrances and galleries, we just retrained them. We instituted bag checks and electronic wanding at the entrances, for metal and weapons, at the three public entrances, and inspected every vehicle coming into the public garage. We did a lot more with the CCTV.” Like other major institutions, the museum also started receiving regular briefings from the FBI and NYPD’s Joint Terrorism Task Force.

Air travel was transformed, practically overnight, into something frustration-fuelled and complicated

Hotels had to make similar security assessments. “Hotels had drills with the task force and the FBI, and ramped up security in their lobbies, with some of the larger ones installing metal detectors,” recalls Vijay Dandapani, president and CEO of the Hotel Association of New York City. The detectors were scrapped quickly as hotels realised they sent the wrong message to guests about the safety of the city.

But as New York recovered, with its new security measures in place, fewer international tourists were there to see it. In 2000, there were more than 35 million visitors to New York City and, of those, 6.8 million were international tourists. In 2002 that number declined to 5.1 million and didn’t reach pre-2001 levels again until 2006.

International visitors are incredibly important to New York’s tourism industry, with the four top countries of origin being China, the UK, Brazil and France. Crucially, they spend more than domestic tourists. “While international travellers account for 20 per cent of visitors, they account for 50 per cent of spending,” says Christopher Heywood, EVP of global communications for NYC & Company. “They stay longer and they spend more while they’re here.”

In 2006, the Bloomberg administration and the city made a big push for travel and tourism, and NYC & Company opened offices around the world and launched global campaigns promoting the city. “We now have 17 international outposts and we highlight all five boroughs,” says Heywood. “Travel to all of them went up, particularly to Brooklyn and also Queens.”

Two decades later, the numbers have not only rebounded, but in 2019 the city had an all-time record high of 66.6 million visitors, 13.5 million of whom were international – double the 2000 numbers. Hotels also had a record 129,000 rooms in March 2020 and occupancy was at nearly 90 per cent, compared with the 9/11 dip to 65 per cent. “International visitors make up 25 per cent of our guests, and UK guests make up the largest percentage of revenue in that group,” says Dandapani.

Now we need the resilience that got us through 9/11 and rebuilt our city

As the city recovered, new hotels staked out territory across Manhattan. Firmdale Hotels opened the Crosby Street Hotel in 2009 in SoHo, its first in New York. “By the time we started that project, New York had bounced back, in particular downtown and SoHo,” says Craig Markham, director. “We always felt that it would be the perfect location for our first New York hotel, with its neighbourhood style similar to our London hotels.”

Hotels also opened across the river in Williamsburg, downtown Brooklyn and Queens, cool boroughs that foreign travellers wanted to explore. “The international market as a general rule is more intrepid than domestic travellers,” says Heywood. “They want to get on public transport and go deep into Brooklyn, to Coney Island, to the Rockaways. The Brits in particular are adventurous and want to explore the city.”

But underneath the record number of visitors, new hotel openings and discoverable neighbourhoods, a permanent change has come to the city. Some of it is visible, like the signs on the subway – “If you see something, say something”, and “Si ve algo, diga algo” – but some is less so, like the increased surveillance by intelligence and police. But the biggest change is the feeling that New York and New Yorkers will always have to live with the threat of terrorism and terrorist attacks. Polls over the last decade show that terrorism fears haven’t waned, and have even gone up at times.

The art of 9/11

Today, with Covid and the global pandemic, the city’s tourism has taken a harder hit than it did after 11 September. A number of hotels have permanently closed, reducing the number of rooms by 20,000; Broadway went dark for 18 months; Midtown restaurants are empty.

“We were the epicentre of Covid in the US and it just wiped out tourism in New York,” says Heywood. “Now we need the resilience that got us through 9/11 and rebuilt our city.”

But if 9/11 proved anything, it’s that New York will always be a place for travellers and tourists. And that, while its tragedies are a matter of fact, it remains an outward-looking city, a seaward-facing city – lamp lifted in perpetual and enduring welcome.

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The 20th Anniversary Of The 9/11 Attacks

The world has changed since 9/11, and so has america's fight against terrorism.

An American flag at ground zero on the evening of Sept. 11, 2001, after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City. Mark Lennihan/AP hide caption

An American flag at ground zero on the evening of Sept. 11, 2001, after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City.

In the fall of 2001, Aaron Zebley was a 31-year-old FBI agent in New York. He had just transferred to a criminal squad after working counterterrorism cases for years.

His first day in the new job was Sept. 11.

"I was literally cleaning the desk, I was like wiping the desk when Flight 11 hit the north tower, and it shook our building," he said. "And I was like, what the heck was that? And later that day, I was transferred back to counterterrorism."

It was a natural move for Zebley. He'd spent the previous three years investigating al-Qaida's bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. And he became a core member of the FBI team leading the investigation into the 9/11 attacks.

It quickly became clear that al-Qaida was responsible.

The hijackers had trained at the group's camps in Afghanistan. They received money and instructions from its leadership. And ultimately, they were sent to the U.S. to carry out al-Qaida's "planes operation."

President George W Bush gives an address in front of the damaged Pentagon following the Sept. 11 terrorist attack there as Counselor to the President Karen Hughes and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld stand by. Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images hide caption

President George W Bush gives an address in front of the damaged Pentagon following the Sept. 11 terrorist attack there as Counselor to the President Karen Hughes and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld stand by.

As the nation mourned the nearly 3,000 people who were killed on 9/11, the George W. Bush administration frantically tried to find its footing and prevent what many feared would be a second wave of attacks.

President Bush ordered members of his administration, including top counterterrorism official Richard Clarke, to imagine what the next attack could look like and take steps to prevent it.

"We had so many vulnerabilities in this country," Clarke said.

At the time, officials were worried that al-Qaida could use chemical weapons or radioactive materials, Clarke said, or that the group would target intercity trains or subway systems.

"We had a very long list of things, systems, that were vulnerable because no one in the United States had seriously considered security from terrorist attacks," he said.

That, of course, quickly changed.

Security became paramount.

And over the next two decades, the federal government poured money and resources — some of it, critics say, to no good use — into protecting the U.S. from another terrorist attack, even as the nature of that threat continuously evolved.

The response to keeping the U.S. secure takes shape

The government built out a massive infrastructure, including creating the Department of Homeland Security, all in the name of protecting against terrorist attacks.

The Bush administration also empowered the FBI and its partners at the CIA, National Security Agency and the Pentagon to take the fight to al-Qaida.

The military invaded Afghanistan, which had been a haven for the group. The CIA hunted down al-Qaida operatives around the world and tortured many of them in secret prisons.

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Part of flight 93 crashed on my land. i went back to the sacred ground 20 years later.

The Bush administration also launched its ill-fated war in Iraq, which unleashed two decades of bloodletting, shook the Middle East and spawned another generation of terrorists.

On the homefront, FBI Director Robert Mueller shifted some 2,000 agents to counterterrorism work as he tried to transform the FBI from a crime-fighting first organization into a more intelligence-driven one that prioritized combating terrorism and preventing the next attack.

Part of that involved centralizing the bureau's international terrorism investigations at headquarters and making counterterrorism the FBI's top priority.

Chuck Rosenberg, who served as a top aide to Mueller in those early years, said the changes Mueller imposed amounted to a paradigm shift for the bureau.

Robert S. Mueller, then-director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, talks to reporters on Aug. 17, 2006, in Seattle. Ted S. Warren/AP hide caption

Robert S. Mueller, then-director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, talks to reporters on Aug. 17, 2006, in Seattle.

"Mueller, God bless him, couldn't be all that patient about it," Rosenberg said. "It couldn't happen at a normal pace of a traditional cultural change. It had to happen yesterday."

It had to happen "yesterday" because al-Qaida was still plotting. Overseas, its operatives carried out horrific bombings in Bali, Madrid, London and elsewhere.

In the U.S., al-Qaida operative Richard Reid was arrested in December 2001 after trying to blow up a trans-Atlantic flight with a bomb hidden in his shoe. More plots were foiled in the ensuing years, including one targeting the Brooklyn Bridge.

Over time, the FBI and its partners better understood al-Qaida, its hierarchical structure, and how to unravel the various threads of a plot.

That stemmed to large degree, Zebley says, from the U.S. getting better at pulling together various threads of intelligence and by upping the operational tempo.

"If you have a little thread that could potentially tell you about a terrorist plot, not only were we much better at integrating the intelligence, but we did it at a pace that was tenfold what we were doing before," he said.

But critics warned that the government's new anti-terrorism tools were eroding civil liberties, while the American Muslim community felt it was all too often the target of an overzealous FBI.

The digital world helps transform terrorism

By the early days of the Obama administration, the U.S. had to a large extent hardened the homeland against 9/11-style plots. But the terrorism landscape was evolving.

At that time, Zebley was serving as a senior aide to Mueller. Each morning, he would sit in on the FBI director's daily threat briefing.

"I was thinking about al-Qaida for years leading up until that moment," he said. "And now I'm sitting in these morning threat briefings and I'm seeing al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb in North Africa, al-Shabab. ... One of my first thoughts was 'the map looks very different to me now.' "

Robert Mueller (left) and Aaron Zebley testify on Capitol Hill in Washington on July 24, 2019, before the House Intelligence Committee hearing on his report on Russian election interference. Susan Walsh/AP hide caption

Robert Mueller (left) and Aaron Zebley testify on Capitol Hill in Washington on July 24, 2019, before the House Intelligence Committee hearing on his report on Russian election interference.

Ultimately, AQAP — al-Qaida's branch based in Yemen — emerged as a significant threat to the U.S. homeland.

That became clear in November 2009 when U.S. Army Maj. Nidal Hasan shot and killed 13 people at Fort Hood, Texas. A month later, on Christmas Day, a young Nigerian man tried to blow up a passenger jet over Detroit with a bomb hidden in his underwear.

It quickly emerged that both men had been in contact with a senior AQAP figure, an American-born Yemeni cleric named Anwar al-Awlaki.

"My sense when I first heard about him was 'well, he's some charismatic guy, born in the U.S., fluent English speaker and all that. But how big a threat could he be?" said John Pistole, who served as the No. 2 official at the FBI from 2004 until 2010 when he left to lead the Transportation Security Administration.

"I think I failed to recognize and appreciate his ability to influence others to action."

Awlaki used the internet to spread his calls for violence against America, and his lectures and ideas influenced attacks in several countries. Awlaki was killed in a U.S. drone strike in 2011, a move that proved controversial because he was an American citizen.

A few years later, a different terrorist group emerged from the cauldron of Syria and Iraq — the Islamic State, or ISIS, a group that would build on Awlaki's savvy use of the digital world.

"When ISIS came onto the scene, particularly that summer of 2014, with the beheadings and the prolific use of social media, it was off the charts," said Mary McCord, who was a senior national security official at the Justice Department at the time.

Her Brother Died On Flight 93. She Still Sees Him Surfacing In Small Ways

Like al-Qaida more than a decade before, ISIS used its stronghold to plan operations abroad, such as the coordinated attacks in 2015 that killed 130 people in Paris. But it also used social media platforms such as Twitter and Telegram to pump out slickly produced propaganda videos.

"They deployed technology in a much more sophisticated way than we had seen with most other foreign terrorist organizations," McCord said.

ISIS produced materials featuring idyllic scenes of life in the caliphate to entice people to move there. At the same time, the group pushed out a torrent of videos showing horrendous violence that sought to instill fear in ISIS' enemies and to inspire the militants' sympathizers in Europe and the U.S. to conduct attacks where they were.

"The threat was much more horizontal. It was harder to corral," said Chuck Rosenberg, who served as FBI Director James Comey's chief of staff.

People inspired by ISIS could go from watching the group's videos to action relatively quickly without setting off alarms.

"It was clear too that there were going to be attacks we just couldn't stop. Things that went from left of boom to right of boom very quickly. People were more discreet, the thing we used to refer to as lone wolves," Rosenberg said. "A lot of bad things could happen, maybe on a smaller scale, but a lot of bad things could happen more quickly."

Bad things did happen

Europe was hit by a series of deadly one-off attacks. In the U.S., a gunman killed 49 people at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Fla., in 2016. A year later, a man used a truck to plow through a group of cyclists and pedestrians in Manhattan, killing eight people. Both men had been watching ISIS propaganda.

A makeshift memorial stands outside the Tree of Life Synagogue in the aftermath of a deadly shooting in Pittsburgh in 2018. Matt Rourke/AP hide caption

A makeshift memorial stands outside the Tree of Life Synagogue in the aftermath of a deadly shooting in Pittsburgh in 2018.

The group's allure waned after a global coalition led by the U.S. managed to retake all the territory that ISIS once claimed.

By then, America's most lethal terror threat already stemmed not from foreign terror groups, but from the country's own domestic extremists.

For nearly two decades, the FBI had prioritized the fight against international terrorists. But in early 2020, FBI Director Christopher Wray said that had changed.

"We elevated to the top-level priority racially motivated violent extremism so it's on the same footing in terms of our national threat banding as ISISI and homegrown violent extremism," he testified before Congress.

The move came in the wake of a series of high-profile attacks by people espousing white supremacist views in Charlottesville, Va., Pittsburgh, Pa., Poway, Calif., and El Paso, Texas.

At the same time, anti-government extremist groups and conspiracy theories like QAnon were attracting more adherents.

Those various movements converged in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6, 2021, in the storming of the U.S. Capitol as Congress was certifying Joe Biden's presidential win.

Rioters climb the west wall of the the U.S. Capitol in Washington on Jan. 6. Jose Luis Magana/AP hide caption

Rioters climb the west wall of the the U.S. Capitol in Washington on Jan. 6.

The FBI has since launched a massive investigation into the assault, and Wray has bluntly described the Capitol riot as "domestic terrorism."

McCord, who is now the executive director at the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection at the Georgetown University Law Center, says domestic extremist groups are using many of the same tools that foreign groups have for years.

"You see that in the use of social media for the same kind of things: to recruit, to propagandize, to plot, and to fundraise," she said.

The Capitol riot has put a spotlight on far-right extremism in a way the issue has never received in the past two decades, including in the media and the highest levels of the U.S. government.

President Biden, for one, has called political extremism and domestic terrorism a looming threat to the country that must be defeated, and he has made combating the threat a priority for his administration.

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Analysis: How 9/11 and its fallout reshaped travel

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Saturday marks two decades since the terror attacks in the US. Ian Taylor looks at how the fallout from that day reshaped travel restrictions but did little to slow global growth in tourism

The 20th anniversary of September 11 will be marked in ways no doubt not intended when President Biden confirmed the US withdrawal from Afghanistan.

The attacks by hijacked aircraft on New York’s Twin Towers and the Pentagon killed almost 3,000 people and triggered a 20-year war after the US and Nato invaded Afghanistan and in 2003 went to war in Iraq.

The impact on travel was far less deadly, but the legacy of the attacks provides pointers to what we might expect as the world learns to live with Covid-19.

The immediate impact was stunning, with US aviation grounded. Within days, industry leaders were warning of failures. Iata chairman Leo Mullin warned the US government: “At least three of our major members are on the brink.” The increase in insurance premiums alone threatened to bankrupt the sector.

The US Department of Transportation (DoT) subsequently reported: “It took until July 2004 for the industry to match and surpass pre-9/11 levels.”

In the event, there were no major US airline failures. But over four years, every major US international carrier bar American Airlines passed through bankruptcy protection. Employment in the sector fell by 28%, or 150,000 jobs.

The DoT reported in 2005: “Today’s airline industry presents a different picture than prior to September 11, with more passengers flying low-cost carriers, fewer empty seats and a smaller workforce. Available seats only recently reached pre-9/11 peaks. In contrast, air passenger travel reached its pre-9/11 peak in July 2004 and continued to grow.”

In Europe, Belgian carrier Sabena collapsed in November 2001 after part-owner Swissair failed to offer a bailout. Swissair followed, taking down France’s second-largest carrier Air Liberté, which it part-owned. However, Swissair-Sabena had been struggling for years. Out of the failures, Swissair subsidiary Crossair emerged as Swiss and Sabena gave way to Brussels Airlines – both now part of the Lufthansa Group.

Impact in UK

You would be hard-pressed to claim 9/11 had a dire impact on UK outbound travel. ONS figures suggest a mere slowdown in growth of outbound holidays between 2000 and 2004.

Overseas holiday numbers rose from 36.7 million in 2000 to 38.7 million in 2001 and to almost 40 million in 2002, then passed 41 million in 2003 and reached almost 43 million in 2004.

UK airport passenger numbers rose from 168 million in 1999 to 180 million in 2001 (+7%) and 199 million in 2003 (+10.5%) also suggesting no great detriment. This was despite the international tension through 2002 as the US and UK prepared for an invasion of Iraq, launched in March 2003.

There was a dip in European air traffic in this period, with the number of commercial flights falling from 8.7 million in 2000 to 8.5 million in 2002.

UK data for overseas business travel suggests the source of the decline, with outbound corporate trips falling 11% between 2000 and 2003, reflecting the impact on transatlantic traffic. Indeed, ONS data suggests there was no overall growth in corporate trips in the decade to 2009.

A dip in overseas visitors to the UK is also clear between 2000 and 2003, reflecting the loss of US travellers post 9/11.

But a more severe impact was anticipated. The Air Travel Trust (ATT) report for the year to March 2002 noted the months following September 11 were “some of the most demanding in recent years” and had “a significant effect on the level and timing of bookings, with a consequent impact on the viability of some Atol holders”.

By March 2003, 23 Atol holders had folded, double the previous year’s total. However, the ATT pointed out the increase was still one of the lowest failure rates since 1989 and “only brings the rate back to the level of the mid-to-late 1990s”.

The next year, to March 2003, saw just nine failures – a new low despite the build-up to the invasion of Iraq.

There was one notable exception. MyTravel, or Airtours as it was known until 2002, was the UK’s second-biggest travel group. Its fortunes plunged spectacularly in 2002 amid a series of profit warnings but also, crucially, the exposure of serious irregularities in its accounts. The group’s share value collapsed. Its £1.3 billion debt dwarfed its value and it was saved only by the CAA declining to pull its Atol and by wiping out its creditors by swapping its debt for equity.

The group downsized and restructured over several years but never recovered and those running it were grateful to merge with Thomas Cook in 2007.

Twelve years on, MyTravel returned to haunt Thomas Cook when in May 2019 Cook was compelled to report a £1.5 billion half-year loss owing to a £1.1 billion impairment in the value of MyTravel which it had retained on the books. The group subsequently went into liquidation.

Impact worldwide

The global picture was not too different to the UK, outside the Americas. The UN World Tourism Organisation (UNWTO) noted: “Tourism enjoyed exceptional years in 2000 and 2001. International arrivals declined 0.5% in 2001, the first year of negative growth since 1982 . . . less than was feared after September 11.”

The Americas suffered a 6% drop in arrivals and the US an 11% fall. But Europe saw less than a 1% decline, although UK arrivals fell 9% reflecting a near cessation of transatlantic travel.

The following year, the UNWTO noted “2002 was certainly not easy” but reported: “International tourist arrivals grew 2.7% . . . although uncertainty continued to play a major role under the threat of new terrorist attacks and the looming Iraq conflict.

“These adverse conditions resulted not so much in a decrease in overall volume, but in the reinforcement of shifts in demand towards trips to familiar destinations closer to home. Consumers adopted a wait-and‑see attitude resulting in pressure on prices and late bookings. Many sectors went through a difficult time, in particular airlines and sectors more dependent on long-haul traffic.”

Arrivals to the US were down almost 7% year on year in 2002. But Asia and the Pacific saw 8% growth, Europe 2% and the UK 6%.

Asia suffered a downturn of its own in 2003 due to Sars, but the UNWTO could report: “International tourism experienced a spectacular rebound in 2004.”

Security measures

Heightened security is the abiding impact of 9/11 on travel, although this can’t be attributed solely to the attacks on the day. Airport security screening was introduced in 1974 after a spate of aircraft hijackings. There had been 159 in US airspace alone by the end of 1972.

The standard check-in query, ‘Could anyone have interfered with your baggage?’, followed a thwarted bomb attack on an El Al flight from London in 1986. That, however, did not stop a bomb bringing down a Pan Am Boeing 747 on route from London to New York over Lockerbie in 1988, killing 270.

The US led the aviation security response to the 2001 attacks, establishing the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), limiting carry-on bags and banning items such as scissors and knives. An attempt by a ‘shoe bomber’ to bring down a Paris-Miami flight in December 2001 saw random inspections of passengers’ shoes added.

In 2006, UK authorities foiled a plot to blow up US-bound aircraft using liquid explosives in carry-on bags, triggering a ban on liquids, gels and aerosols. The ban was later changed to allow small quantities of liquids in a single plastic bag.

An attempt to detonate ‘underwear’ explosives on an Amsterdam-Detroit flight in 2009 led to the first advanced imaging technology or ‘full body scanners’ being introduced in the US in 2010.

In 2015 the TSA demanded enhanced screening and random searches at airports with direct flights to the US in response to a growing threat of concealed improvised explosive devices. In 2017, it went further, initially banning laptops and devices bigger than phones in cabin baggage on flights from the Middle East and then requiring these be screened separately.

There appears little prospect of any of the major security requirements being withdrawn. The pandemic threat appears similarly likely to remain with us, bringing screening requirements of its own. We may just have to live with these and expect refinements rather than removal.

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9/11 Timeline

By: History.com Editors

Updated: September 11, 2023 | Original: June 21, 2011

On September 11, 2001 —a clear, sunny, late summer day—al Qaeda terrorists aboard three hijacked passenger planes carried out coordinated suicide attacks against the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. , killing everyone on board the planes and nearly 3,000 people on the ground. A fourth plane crashed into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, killing all on board, after passengers and crew attempted to wrest control from the hijackers.

Below is a chronology of the events of 9/11 as they unfolded. All times are Eastern Daylight Time (EDT).

• 7:59 am – American Airlines Flight 11, a Boeing 767 with 92 people aboard, takes off from Boston’s Logan International Airport en route to Los Angeles.

• 8:14 am – United Airlines Flight 175, a Boeing 767 with 65 people aboard, takes off from Boston; it is also headed to Los Angeles.

• 8:19 am – Flight attendants aboard Flight 11 alert ground personnel that the plane has been hijacked; American Airlines notifies the FBI .

• 8:20 am – American Airlines Flight 77 takes off from Dulles International Airport outside of Washington, D.C. The Boeing 757 is headed to Los Angeles with 64 people aboard.

• 8:24 am – Hijacker Mohammed Atta makes the first of two accidental transmissions from Flight 11 to ground control (apparently in an attempt to communicate with the plane’s cabin).

• 8:40 am – Air traffic controllers at The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) alert North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD)’s Northeast Air Defense Sector (NEADS) about the suspected hijacking of Flight 11. In response, NEADS located at Cape Cod’s Otis Air National Guard Base to locate and tail Flight 11; they are not yet in the air when Flight 11 crashes into the North Tower.

• 8:40 am – Air traffic controllers at The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) alert North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD)’s Northeast Air Defense Sector (NEADS) about the suspected hijacking of Flight 11. In response, NEADS scrambles two fighter planes located at Cape Cod’s Otis Air National Guard Base to locate and tail Flight 11; they are not yet in the air when Flight 11 crashes into the North Tower.

• 8:41 am – United Airlines Flight 93 , a Boeing 757 with 44 people aboard, takes off from Newark International Airport en route to San Francisco . It had been scheduled to depart at 8:00 am, around the time of the other hijacked flights.

• 8:46 am – Mohammed Atta and the other hijackers aboard American Airlines Flight 11 crash the plane into floors 93-99 of the North Tower of the World Trade Center , killing everyone on board and hundreds inside the building.

Photos: The World Trade Center

• 8:47 am – Within seconds, NYPD and FDNY forces dispatch units to the World Trade Center, while Port Authority Police Department officers on site begin immediate evacuation of the North Tower.

• 8:50 am – White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card alerts President George W. Bush that a plane has hit the World Trade Center; the president is visiting an elementary school in Sarasota, Florida at the time.

• 9:02 am – After initially instructing tenants of the WTC’s South Tower to remain in the building, Port Authority officials broadcast orders to evacuate both towers via the public address system; an estimated 10,000 to 14,000 people are already in the process of evacuating.

• 9:03 am – Hijackers crash United Airlines Flight 175 into floors 75-85 of the WTC’s South Tower, killing everyone on board and hundreds inside the building

• 9:08 am – The FAA bans all takeoffs of flights going to New York City or through the airspace around the city.

• 9:21 am – The Port Authority closes all bridges and tunnels in the New York City area.

• 9:24 am – The FAA notified NEADS of the suspected hijacking of Flight 77 after some passengers and crew aboard are able to alert family members on the ground.

• 9:31 am – Speaking from Florida, President Bush calls the events in New York City an “apparent terrorist attack on our country.”

• 9:37 am – Hijackers aboard Flight 77 crash the plane into the western façade of the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., killing 59 aboard the plane and 125 military and civilian personnel inside the building.

Photos: The Pentagon

• 9:42 am – For the first time in history, the FAA grounds all flights over or bound for the continental United States. Over the next two-and-a-half hours, some 3,300 commercial flights and 1,200 private planes are guided to land at airports in Canada and the United States.

• 9:45 am – Amid escalating rumors of other attacks, the White House and U.S. Capitol building are evacuated (along with numerous other high-profile buildings, landmarks and public spaces).

• 9:59 am – The South Tower of the World Trade Center collapses.

• 10:07 am – After passengers and crew members aboard the hijacked Flight 93 contact friends and family and learn about the attacks in New York and Washington, they mount an attempt to retake the plane. In response, hijackers deliberately crash the plane into a field in Somerset County, Pennsylvania , killing all 40 passengers and crew aboard.

Photos: Flight 93

• 10:28 am – The World Trade Center’s North Tower collapses, 102 minutes after being struck by Flight 11.

• 11 am – Mayor Rudolph Giuliani calls for the evacuation of Lower Manhattan south of Canal Street, including more than 1 million residents, workers and tourists, as efforts continue throughout the afternoon to search for survivors at the WTC site.

• 1 pm – At Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana , President Bush announces that U.S. military forces are on high alert worldwide.

• 2:51 pm – The U.S. Navy dispatches missile destroyers to New York and Washington, D.C.

• 5:20 pm – The 47-story Seven World Trade Center collapses after burning for hours; the building had been evacuated in the morning, and there are no casualties, though the collapse forces rescue workers to flee for their lives. It is the last of the Twin Towers to fall.

• 6:58 pm – President Bush returns to the White House after stops at military bases in Louisiana and Nebraska .

• July 22, 2004: The 9/11 Commission Report is released. It includes classified documents, airport security footage of the hijackers, and cockpit voice recordings from United Airlines Flight 93. The report claims all 19 hijackers were members of al Qaeda.

• October 17, 2006: A federal judge rejects New York City’s motion to dismiss lawsuits from first responders who are requesting health payments.

• January 2, 2011: The James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act of 2010 is signed into law by President Barack Obama . It renews and expands the Victim Compensation Fund.

• May 2, 2011: Osama bin Laden is killed by U.S. Navy Seals.

• September 11, 2011: The World Trade Center Memorial opens to the public on the 10th anniversary of the attacks.

• May 10, 2014: The unidentified remains of people killed in New York City on 9/11 are returned to the World Trade Center Site.

• May 15, 2014: The National September 11 Memorial & Museum is dedicated in lower Manhattan.

• November 3, 2014: One World Trade Center officially opens on the site of the Twin Towers

• July 29, 2019: President Donald Trump signs $10 billion legislation authorizing support for the Victims Compensation Fund through 2092.

• August 30, 2019: A U.S. military court judge in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba sets a trial date of January 11, 2021 for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the other four men charged with plotting the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001; the trial was later postponed because of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

• July 31, 2022: Ayman al-Zawahiri, a key planner of the attacks and the leader of al Qaeda following bin Laden's death, is killed in a U.S. drone strike in Kabul, Afghanistan. 

HISTORY Vault: 9/11 Documentaries

Explore this collection of extraordinary documentary films about one of the most challenging days in U.S. history.

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Please note you do not have access to teaching notes, the never ending war: 9/11 and its recent effects on tourism industry.

Overtourism as Destination Risk

ISBN : 978-1-83909-707-2 , eISBN : 978-1-83909-706-5

Publication date: 13 May 2021

Today's terrorism has been considered one of the main global threats the Western civilisation faces, even a great challenge posed for the next years. After 9/11, theorists of tourism triplicated the number of publications that took tourism security and terrorism as main objects of study. In spite of the proliferation of these studies, terrorism targeted the main European cities such as London, Madrid, Paris and Brussels (only to name a few). Over years, scholars believed that the industry of tourism was particularly sensitive to terrorism; at least the decline of tourist destinations in the Middle East seems to testify this assumption. In this complex context, two significant families of theories surface: the socio-cultural theory and the economic-based theory. Though debated in the chapter, we opt for a third alternative model which expands the current understanding of terrorism. The chapter not only explores the historical intersection between tourism and terrorism but also deciphers the moral dilemmas of extortion which remains as the touchstone of Western capitalism.

• Consumption

Korstanje, M.E. (2021), "The Never Ending War: 9/11 and Its Recent Effects on Tourism Industry", Sharma, A. and Hassan, A. (Ed.) Overtourism as Destination Risk ( Tourism Security-Safety and Post Conflict Destinations ), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 57-68. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-83909-706-520211005

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Orlando Cepeda dies

US tourist killed in Zambia elephant attack, the second this year

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JOHANNESBURG (AP) — A U.S. tourist was killed by an elephant in the Zambian city of Livingstone Wednesday — in the second such attack in the country this year — local officials said.

The officials said Friday that 64-year-old Juliana Gle Tourneau was killed when an elephant that was part of a herd the tourists were watching attacked their vehicle, threw Tourneau out and trampled her.

She was part of a group that had stopped near the Maramba Cultural Bridge due to the traffic caused by the elephant herd near the bridge, they added.

“Juliana Gle Tourneau, 64, of New Mexico, United States of America, died on Wednesday around 17.50 after being knocked from a parked vehicle which had stopped due to traffic caused by elephants around the Maramba Cultural Bridge,” Southern Province Police Commissioner Auxensio Daka told the Zambian national broadcaster, ZNBC.

It is the second such attack this year after another American tourist was killed in March this year during a game drive in a Zambian national park when an elephant charged a truck, flipped it over, killed the tourist and injured five others.

Zambian authorities have called on tourists to exercise extreme caution while observing wildlife around the country.

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A Tourist From New Mexico Is Killed by an Elephant in Zambia

The incident came months after another tourist was killed in Zambia when an elephant charged her group. One wildlife expert said the attacks were most likely “freak accidents.”

By Sara Ruberg and Emily Schmall

A tourist from New Mexico was killed in Zambia when an elephant charged her, according to the police commissioner who investigated the incident. She is the second tourist to be fatally attacked by an elephant in the southern African country this year.

The woman who was killed, Juliana G. Letourneau, 64, of Albuquerque, had just visited Victoria Falls, a 350-foot waterfall that straddles the border between Zambia and Zimbabwe, and was heading back to her hotel on Wednesday when the group that she was traveling with encountered a herd of elephants on the road.

She and others stepped out of their vehicle to observe the animals, said Auxensio Daka, the police commissioner for the southern province of Zambia, in a telephone interview on Saturday.

“They stopped to watch the elephants, and unfortunately one of them charged towards them as they were standing there watching,” Mr. Daka said.

Mr. Daka said that Ms. Letourneau was taken to a clinic in Mosi-oa-Tunya National Park near Livingstone, Zambia, where she was declared dead on arrival. Her injuries included deep wounds on the right shoulder blade and forehead, a fractured left ankle and a slightly depressed chest, according to a police statement.

No other injuries were reported from the encounter with the elephant.

Ms. Letourneau’s brother said on Saturday that he had no details about the incident, and declined to be interviewed. Other relatives could not be reached.

This past March, a 79-year-old American woman was on safari at Kafue National Park, in a central region of western Zambia, when an elephant charged the tour group’s vehicle, according to media reports .

However, human deaths are rare in encounters with elephants, according to experts.

“This is really a freak accident,” Nikhil Advani, a senior director at the World Wildlife Fund, a nonprofit that works on environmental protection and conservation efforts, said of the two incidents happening so close together. “It’s probably just some sort of coming together of unfortunate circumstances that led to this.”

The U.S. State Department said in a statement on Friday that millions of Americans travel to areas where there is wildlife every year, and that it is uncommon for elephants and other wild animals to attack visitors in Zambia.

Ms. Letourneau’s death was first reported by the Zambia National Broadcasting Corporation, a government-controlled news outlet, which said that human and wildlife encounters in Livingstone, the city where the incident occurred, were rising amid the country’s worst drought in four decades .

The climate conditions are worsening food insecurity in Zambia, which has one of the highest rates of malnutrition in sub-Saharan Africa, and pushing wildlife into human habitats in search of food and water, according to the report.

Tourism to wildlife protected areas, which cover about a third of Zambia, and to the numerous lakes and rivers and lush valleys contributes an important share of the national economy.

Joyce Poole, a co-founder and co-director of ElephantVoices, a nonprofit that researches elephant behavior, said that keeping distance from elephants is the best way for tourists to stay safe. She added that there can sometimes be a “culture of aggression” stemming from a region’s history with elephants, as in Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique, which experienced decades of war and poaching in the 20th century.

“Elephants responded in a certain way toward vehicles,” Dr. Poole said of her research findings from Gorongosa. “This behavior was then observed by younger elephants, imitated by younger elephants and sort of passed down through families.” There have been multiple poaching crises in Zambia, she noted.

Dr. Poole said that finding “a reputable company and drivers who are not just racing around to get the best shot” would be a good way for visitors to ensure safety.

Visitors to wilderness areas should also be wary and admire the animals from afar, experts say.

“As with all wildlife, like if you keep safe distance from them, they are not looking to disturb you or interact with you,” Dr. Advani said.

Sara Ruberg covers breaking news and is a member of the 2024-25 class of Times Fellows , a program for journalists early in their careers. More about Sara Ruberg

Emily Schmall covers breaking news and feature stories and is based in Chicago. More about Emily Schmall

U.S. tourist killed in Zambia elephant attack, the second this year

JOHANNESBURG — A U.S. tourist was killed by an elephant in the Zambian city of Livingstone Wednesday — in  the second such attack  in the country this year — local officials said.

The officials said Friday that 64-year-old Juliana Gle Tourneau was killed when an elephant that was part of a herd the tourists were watching attacked their vehicle, threw Tourneau out and trampled her.

She was part of a group that had stopped near the Maramba Cultural Bridge due to the traffic caused by the elephant herd near the bridge, they added.

“Juliana Gle Tourneau, 64, of New Mexico, United States of America, died on Wednesday around 17.50 after being knocked from a parked vehicle which had stopped due to traffic caused by elephants around the Maramba Cultural Bridge,” Southern Province Police Commissioner Auxensio Daka told the Zambian national broadcaster, ZNBC.

It is the second such attack this year after another American tourist was killed in March this year during a game drive in a Zambian national park when an elephant charged a truck, flipped it over, killed the tourist and injured five others.

Zambian authorities have called on tourists to exercise extreme caution while observing wildlife around the country.

The Associated Press

Watch CBS News

American woman killed by elephant in Zambia, the second such attack this year

Updated on: June 21, 2024 / 2:36 PM EDT / CBS/AP

A New Mexico woman visiting Zambia was trampled and killed by an elephant on Wednesday, local officials said. It marked the second such attack in the country this year.

Officials said Friday that 64-year-old Juliana Gle Tourneau was killed when an elephant that was part of a herd the tourists were watching attacked their vehicle in the Zambian city of Livingstone. Tourneau was thrown from the vehicle and trampled by the elephant.

Tourneau was part of a group that had stopped near the Maramba Cultural Bridge due to the traffic caused by the elephant herd near the bridge, officials added.

"Juliana Gle Tourneau, 64, of New Mexico, United States of America, died on Wednesday around 17.50 after being knocked from a parked vehicle which had stopped due to traffic caused by elephants around the Maramba Cultural Bridge," Southern Province Police Commissioner Auxensio Daka told the Zambian national broadcaster, ZNBC.

It is the second such attack this year after another American tourist was killed in March this year during a game drive in Zambia's Kafue National Park . In that incident, an elephant charged a truck, flipped it over, killed the tourist, and injured five others.

Family members confirmed that Gail Mattson, a 79-year-old Minnesotan, was killed in the attack. In a post on Facebook, Rona Wells said her mother died in a "tragic accident while on her dream adventure."

The attack was captured in a harrowing cellphone video. The clip, shot by tourists, begins inside an open safari vehicle during the game drive.

In the distance, a large bull elephant can be seen coming toward the vehicle. The vehicle's occupants cannot be seen in the video clip, but someone is heard, saying "Oh my goodness," before a man says, "It's coming fast."

The vehicle stops and then another voice, presumably the game ranger, tries to ward off the elephant verbally as the large pachyderm hooks its tusks onto the vehicle and rolls it several times.

Zambian authorities have called on tourists to exercise extreme caution while observing wildlife around the country.

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20-year-old tourist injured in potential shark attack in Hawaii

Hawaii Island police said they're investigating a possible shark attack that injured a 20-year-old man visiting the island from Romania.

The man was swimming about 15 to 20 feet offshore at Anaeho'omalu Bay in Waikoloa at the time, the Hawaii Police Department said.

Around 5:30 p.m. Monday, he felt pain on his right foot and saw lacerations "bleeding profusely" on the top and bottom of his foot, police said.

The man was hospitalized in non-life-threatening condition with injuries medical personnel described as consistent with a shark bite, police said.

The victim and two people near him in the water didn't spot a shark, police added.

The potential attack comes days after a well-known surfer and lifeguard was killed by a shark near the North Shore of Oahu, emergency officials said.

Tamayo Perry, 49, had been a lifeguard with Honolulu Ocean Safety since 2016. He was a local surf coach and competed for years in the Pipeline Master Trials, according to his official bio on his coaching site. Perry appeared in the 2002 movie "Blue Crush," along with episodes of "Hawaii Five-O" and "The Bridge," according to IMDb.

"The world knew Tamayo as a surfer and an actor, but to those who knew him best, he was a man of deep faith ... now taken too soon," his wife, Emilia Perry, told ABC News in an exclusive interview. "I feel so upset and devastated. But I also have a weird calmness in my heart knowing that he's in a better place."

Click here for what to know about staying safe from sharks.

Gregarious, ‘Zen’ and, police say, a killer

The arrest of Eugene Gligor in the killing of his ex-girlfriend’s mother has forced friends to reckon with the man they thought they knew.

The affluent area just outside D.C. was still dumbfounded by the brutal killing of a 50-year-old woman when Eugene Gligor got the question.

“Who do you think did it?”

At the time, it seemed like gossip from a friend’s mother who figured he must care, since he’d dated the victim’s daughter for about five years. Police had yet to make an arrest in the attack inside the family’s Chevy Chase, Md., home.

Gligor made eye contact with the woman, recalled a friend who witnessed the exchange. Then he replied. Steady and even-keeled, with an answer he would maintain for 23 years.

“Your guess is as good as mine.”

Now, that conversation is one of dozens that have haunted his friends and co-workers since last week, when police arrested Gligor, 44, on a charge of first-degree murder in the killing of his ex-girlfriend’s mother. After decades without answers, authorities said he was the one who, on May 2, 2001, strangled Leslie J. Preer and battered her head on the foyer floor.

“It was almost impossible to believe — like, Eugene?” said Jordan Weiers, Gligor’s mentee at a real estate company, where Weiers worked from 2018 to 2021. “I couldn’t imagine him hurting a fly.”

Police say that new analysis recently brought them closer to Gligor and that this month they matched his DNA to evidence from the crime scene. His brother and mother declined to comment, as did his attorney, Isabelle Raquin, citing a policy at her firm not to comment on active cases. He’s being held in the Montgomery County jail ahead of a hearing next month.

Interviews with eight people who knew Gligor offer a stark contrast between the person described in court documents and the man he portrayed himself to be. The friends, some of whom have known him since high school, said they saw Gligor as warm and gregarious. One person described him as “Zen.” The only hints of trouble they could see came from a teenage knack for the mischievous and past struggles with alcohol — challenges later overshadowed by what appeared to be a commitment to personal growth and self-improvement.

Now they are turning over their memories, trying to parse fact from fiction, charisma from deceptiveness, the accused killer from their friend with thick-framed glasses and silky brown hair.

“He was a happy, positive person,” said Joseph McDermott, 34, who worked with Gligor at a real estate company, Homesnap, which has since been acquired by CoStar. “We are all just shocked.”

As they grapple — most persuaded, even if stunned, that DNA evidence appears to connect Gligor to the killing — other court filings and anecdotes from acquaintances have surfaced that show potential warning signs.

A former wife once accused him of throwing objects, punching walls and yelling in her face, according to court records.

One former co-worker described how Gligor’s initial warmth gave way to condescending superiority.

Several of the friends spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of interfering with legal proceedings. The person who witnessed the conversation between Gligor and a friend’s mother after the killing said he feared backlash for being associated with Gligor.

Gligor was raised a 10-minute walk from the Preer family in the Kenwood section of Maryland, a neighborhood known for its close commute into Washington and a collection of cherry trees whose blossoms draw tourists wanting to avoid crowds at the Tidal Basin. He had an older brother and two highly educated parents. Court records show that his father was a tenured professor at the University of Maryland and ran a consulting firm; his mother worked for the World Bank before leaving the position to raise her two boys at home.

By the time Leslie Preer’s daughter, Lauren Preer, and Gligor were dating as high school students, his parents were careening toward divorce, Lauren Preer said. Court records show a contentious process, with Virgil Gligor asserting that his wife “condoned the children’s shoplifting, drug use, and theft of money, alleging that they are part of the children’s ‘growth experiences.’” Judith Graves “vehemently” denied the assertion, according to the court records.

Eugene Gligor was expelled from a boarding school after two months in the year the couple’s divorce began, court records state without explanation. The divorce weighed on him, Lauren Preer said.

Virgil Gligor could not be reached, and Graves declined to comment. Officials at the Montgomery County Police Department declined to answer questions about Gligor’s childhood and work history, saying they’re not relevant to their investigation of Leslie Preer’s killing.

Lauren Preer and two friends said they knew that Gligor could get into mischief in high school — like when he sprayed shaving cream into fans on his back patio and white dust covered his backyard. But none shared memories of violence; just time spent at his house on Brookside Drive, and at hers on Drummond Avenue.

He was a staple for years at the Preer home, where Lauren Preer remembered her mother cooking him meals.

Preer was so sure her then-boyfriend was sweet and sensitive that she marched down to a local police station — she believes sometime around 1995 — with her best friend to defend him when, she said, investigators thought he matched the description of someone who had assaulted a woman on the bike path between their houses.

Preer remembered her best friend showing officers how many boys in their class resembled Gligor.

“We both said, there is no way Eugene would have done this,” Preer said .

The memory now enrages her as feelings of betrayal manifest.

On Thursday, a spokesman for the Montgomery County Police Department, the county’s main law enforcement agency, said it had no record of reported assaults in the area from that time. Detectives are looking into whether it may have been handled by a smaller agency in the area.

Gligor and Preer broke up after a period of long-distance dating in a dissolution their friends recalled as mutual and uneventful.

His friends said he was enrolled in college at the time; his LinkedIn profile says he was at the University of Maryland Global Campus from 1999 to 2003.

Preer said she and Gligor saw each other a few times in the period following their split. She said that she could not recall exactly how long they had been broken up before her mom was killed but that they were both dating other people by then.

Leslie Preer was found dead inside her house on Drummond Avenue. A detective later told a reporter it was a “pretty brutal crime scene.” Blood was in the foyer.

Hundreds of Lauren Preer’s friends and family members turned out to support her at the funeral. But Gligor, according to Preer and three friends, was not there.

Instead, he drove across the country to Portland, Ore., to visit a friend who said he learned of the trip when Gligor was already on his way.

The friend said he remembered thinking he would have gone to the funeral if he’d been in Gligor’s shoes, given the time he’d spent with the Preer family. The friend assumed it was just too much pressure for Gligor, he recalled — an explanation other friends recalled Gligor giving them at the time.

They figured he was telling the truth.

When he got to Portland, Gligor was especially talkative over breakfast at the Cup & Saucer Cafe, the friend said. Then, he assumed Gligor was on edge over something else. Now, he said, he wonders if Gligor was nervous.

Back in Maryland, investigators had been collecting DNA evidence from Leslie Preer’s home and from under her fingernails — the latter a sign she’d tried to fight off her attacker. As the case went on, though, they could not match that DNA to anyone, including men who knew Preer and who were asked to provide DNA samples.

Police initially zeroed in on Preer’s husband as a suspect, but Lauren Preer said she knew he was innocent. Carl “Sandy” Preer died of septic shock in 2017. His daughter said he had repeatedly told her that there was “something off about” Gligor.

Nearly nine months after the homicide, a tipster reported concerns about Gligor to police, according to new court records. The tipster, a previous neighbor of Gligor’s, “thought that he may be somehow related to the Leslie Preer murder,” detectives wrote in a recent affidavit.

It appears investigators did not seek DNA from Gligor in 2002. “There’s no information in the case file to suggest that he was asked,” said Shiera Goff, a Montgomery police spokeswoman.

Decades passed.

Gligor moved to New York and worked in the restaurant industry, multiple friends said. He got married, then divorced in 2015, court records show. He started working in business development. He visited a friend in San Diego. They went to the beach. He moved back to D.C. and hosted Super Bowl watch parties with his second wife. He played in multiple fantasy-football leagues and enjoyed fine dining.

During those years, three friends said, Gligor struggled at various points with alcoholism. They said they believed he went to rehab and became sober.

Many people knew Gligor had struggled with substance use, said Weiers, who met Gligor in 2018 at Homesnap and said he spoke openly about regularly attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. “But that was very much not who he was when I met him.”

The side of Gligor that Weiers and other colleagues saw, for the most part, was business-savvy, community-oriented and introspective. He was a member of the “culture crew” — a group responsible for organizing events in line with company values — and one year donated $1,000 to Community of Hope, a nonprofit that provides health care for underserved families in D.C., McDermott said.

Weiers recalled Gligor recommending a self-help book called “The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom,” which offers a code of conduct to achieve “ freedom, true happiness, and love .”

Another one of Gligor’s colleagues, Michael Kyle, 44, said Gligor could have a temper. He described him as defensive when challenged, like one time when Kyle confronted him about comments on a work call that he found problematic.

“Some people are receptive and warm,” Kyle said. “He does that at first when he meets everybody, but then is a giant, condescending prick.”

Still, neither his colleagues nor his friends said they were aware of any violent tendencies — or what was unfolding at his home.

In 2021, court records show, Gligor’s second wife sought a protective order against him, alleging that his behavior was unpredictable and scared her. The request was denied by a Montgomery County District Court commissioner because there was “no reasonable grounds to believe that abuse — as defined in the statute — occurred,” according to court records.

In her petition, the woman said Gligor had demonstrated erratic behavior off and on, such as throwing objects and punching walls. There’s no indication that charges were filed. A woman who answered a phone number listed under her name declined to comment.

Around the same time, Lauren Preer said, Gligor’s brother texted her saying he was worried that Gligor was going to hurt him. Preer, unsure of what to do and focused on taking care of herself, said she decided not to reply. His brother, reached by phone, declined to comment.

His friends said they knew that Gligor had gotten a divorce but that in the years before his arrest, he appeared to lead a happy life in and around D.C.

In their telling, he went to the National Archives, traveled, enjoyed a Wu-Tang Clan concert and continued to eat at the area’s finest restaurants. He spent Thanksgiving with a friend’s extended family. He started dating someone new.

On June 9, Gligor was at Dulles Airport. He opened a water bottle, drank from it and threw it away. Investigators quietly grabbed it and then tested it for his DNA.

A week later, Gligor texted a friend to wish him a happy Father’s Day. His friend asked what he was up to, according to messages reviewed by The Washington Post.

“Relaxing at home with the lady,” Gligor replied. “Been a busy week since back from Europe.”

He said he had finally gotten over jet lag.

Two days later, he was in handcuffs.