SEPTEMBER 11 - ONE YEAR ON: ANTHONY OSBORNE was standing at the top of the World Trade Centre just two days before the events of September 11.

One year on, he reflects on his experiences in New York.

THE events of September 11 will live with people around the world for years to come. For myself it has some personal significance having returned from New York the day before the tragedy.

Days before, I had made the long trip to Lower Manhattan, and made the astonishingly fast elevator trip to the top of the quarter-mile tall building to marvel at the spectacle of New York and America for the first time. Clear-blue skies skies offered a view of many miles.

The following day I awoke from a jetlagged sleep to see the horrific pictures of the airliners slamming into the buildings.

The buildings, which held thousands of workers and was enjoyed by thousands more tourists, were little more than rubble, scrap steel and dust within two hours of the first plane hitting.

I considered myself lucky, I had never been to the United States and to watch an event like this unfold the moment you return was a shock to the system.

Shocking even more that this occurred in the land of the free. New York, despite past reputations, is one of the safest cities in the world. No stranger to the dangers of terrorism, many of the tourist attractions are guarded by armed police while bags are X-rayed and bodies scanned for metal objects. No threats are taken lightly.

But no-one person could have predicted the methods used that day. The hijacking of an airliner and its passengers could only have been dreamt up by the most murderous, evil and envious kind of person, with no care at all apart to settle a score with the western world and the United States itself.

September 11 didn't just affect the eight million people of the New York. Everyone of the six billion people on this planet has been touched by these events on this day last year and it goes to show the distances and the means that the perpetrators of this atrocity will go to achieve their goal.

On that day, the world changed, for good or for bad. We will have to wait and see.