'New York coffee stop on 9/11 saved my life'

A man who was in New York during the 9/11 attacks said he would have been at the twin towers when the planes hit if he not stopped for a coffee.

Nearly 3,000 people were killed when two of the four planes were hijacked and used to crash into the World Trade Centre on the morning of 11 September 2001.

Paul Lilley, manager of HSBC in Chippenham at the time, was in New York with his wife Wendy for their 20th wedding anniversary.

"We were on our way to the twin towers when everything kicked off," he said. "If it hadn't been for my wife wanting to stop and have a coffee, we probably would have been very near to the towers when the planes hit."

Lilley said: "It's bizarre because it feels like it was yesterday when we were told a plane had hit one of the towers.

"We assumed it was a light aircraft.

"It was only when the second plane went in that we realised it was something out of the ordinary."

Lilley said he has tried not to let the events change his life.

"You cannot let those sort of situations impact on the way you lead your life or else you're going to be afraid to go outside of your front door," he said.

Lilley and his wife Wendy have flown to New York every five years since 9/11 to pay their respects to those who died.

Marisa Domizio was also in New York on the day of the attacks.

She moved to Bristol in 2003 but she was in New York on 11 September 2001.

"I woke up and I was going to go to work and I opened the curtains and saw them [the twin towers] on fire," Domizio said.

"I ran out the door to the coffee shop just to be around other people, talking to them to figure out what was actually happening.

"It was huge, even today, it could be five years ago to me - it's that vivid."

A third plane flew into the Pentagon that day, the headquarters of the United States Department of Defence in Virginia.

Bob Ayers, a retired CIA intelligence officer who now lives on the Blackdowns near Taunton, lost some of his colleagues who were working in the Pentagon.

"At the time we didn't know what was next," he said.

"All I knew [was that] whoever was responsible for the attacks, I was very angry and wanted to hunt them down," Ayers told BBC Radio Somerset.

"I'd worked in the Pentagon for several years. The part of the building the plane flew into was office spaces where some of my colleagues had been working.

"They were all killed."

Ayers said that after the event, there had been people who believed the CIA had not picked up on the signs in time.

"But nothing like this had happened before and it was difficult to imagine suicidal missions of airplanes flying into buildings," Ayers said.

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