By Jide Ajani, with agency reports
It was a beautiful Tuesday, said Rudy Giuliani, Mayor of New York.  It was actually a day for the primaries preparatory to picking a candidate for that office and Guiliani lapped it up.  “It was a beautiful day, the sky was blue”, he said in an interview broadcast on National Geographic channel last week. But that was the day the world changed.
“September 11 is like Pearl Harbor and the assassination of President Kennedy nearly every American remembers where there were when they found out,” Giuliani said.
He was at the Peninsula Hotel having breakfast with some friends when the news of what was happening was brought to him.
He immediately headed for the World Trade Centre, which at that time had only one tower on fire.
“I started to see the flames as I was six miles away, getting closer and closer,” Giuliani said. Before he got to the World Trade Centre, Giuliani learnt that a second plane had just hit the second tower.
“I saw an inferno. I saw the worst thing I ever saw in my life which is human beings throwing themselves out of the 101, 102, 103 floor,” he said.
It was then clear New York was under attack. “We had been told seven planes were missing so we thought, my goodness we thought maybe two or three of those planes would be heading for the Empire State building, St. Patricks Cathedral, the New York Stock Exchange, Statue of Liberty, any number of sites in New York,” he said.
Giuliani quickly got in contact with the White House seeking for help from the air force. But where Giuliani thought he would was itself seeking refuge:  The White House was being evacuated because the Pentagon had just been hit. Another plane, a fourth hijacked plane bound for Washington had crashed in Pennsylvania – the third plane had crashed into the PENTAGON, the world’s largest building.
Once he got this very sad news, in addition to the already sad happenings at the World Trade Centres, Giuliani’said:“Creates a very strange feeling here, I felt like you are on your own. Here we are in New York and they are evacuating the White House. What’s going to come next”.
At this time, American President, George Bush, who was still attempting to settle in his presidency, was in southwest Florida. It was Vice-President Dick Cheney that called back Giuliani. According to Giuliani, I “Picked up the phone held it for a moment, then I heard a buzz, the room started to shake the phone went out people were going under the desk what had happened was the first tower had come down.
Meanwhile, “Chief Esposito yelled ‘the tower is coming down.’ I thought he meant the tower above the World Trade Centre (the communications mast) not the entire World Trade Centre. But it was pounding our building and it seemed like an earthquake things were shaking and we got trapped in the building for 20 minutes.”
When Giuliani got outside to see what was happening, he said it looked like a nuclear bomb had exploded. He feared the final death toll. Estimates, he said, were not reliable.
First was a 12,000 figure. The final number 2,753. Giuliani believes so many lives were saved because of the way New Yorkers reacted. “I saw a very brave determined response. I didn’t see panic,” he said.