New amateur footage of 9/11 emerges

The rarely seen views of the attacks, one of the most recorded events of all time, are among hundreds of hours of amateur videos, images and stories gathered by the foundation building the National September 11 Memorial & Museum. 

The foundation's website has photographs, video and audio recollections by professional photographers, fleeing trade centre workers and witnesses who recorded what they saw with cellphone and digital cameras.

Each photo is juxtaposed against current Google "Street View" photos of various locations.

Users can click on locations, themes or time of day to view the footage or images.

The graphic images of hijacked jetliners crashing into the towers are among the accounts that will become an exhibit in the 9/11 museum when it opens in three years.

One victim's family member said the images wouldn't keep him away, saying the story of September 11 must be as realistic and complete as possible.

The foundation has acquired 500 hours of video archives assembled by Camera Planet, a private team of filmmakers who collected professional and amateur videos from the day and its aftermath.

They include a five-minute video shot in the streets of lower Manhattan around the site on the evening of the attacks, with office stairwells filled with reams of paper and half-open offices with family pictures still inside.

A dust-covered Brooks Brothers logo is in one frame under shattered windows. What appears to be an airliner seat is strewn in the street.

"Got that?" one videographer asks on the video showing the explosion of the second tower when it's hit by the jetliner.

"What kind of crazy person would .... kill themselves?" another asks as the camera points at the two towers.

9/11 Memorial Preview Site now open

Some of the submissions already are on display at the 9/11 Memorial Preview Site, opened last month near ground zero as a temporary exhibit until the memorial and museum are completed.

There, visitors can see a film of the attacks, with a live Webcam showing the ongoing construction on the former World Trade Centre's 6.5 hectares.

The memorial is expected to open on the 10th anniversary of the attacks in 2011, and the museum a year later.

The names of nearly 3,000 victims of the attacks in New York, at the Pentagon and in Pennsylvania, as well as those from the 1993 trade centre truck bombing, will be around two waterfall-filled pools.

The 100-thousand-square-foot (9,290-square-meter) museum will reach 21 metres underground, tracing the towers' original footprints.

Photographs of thousands of terrorism victims will be flashed on a mammoth wall, with each remembered in movies, photos and narration.