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World Trade Center

The two towers in the Special Victims Unit opening credits.

The World Trade Center in New York City, United States (sometimes informally referred to as the WTC or the Twin Towers) was a complex of seven buildings in Lower Manhattan. Both towers were destroyed in the 9/11 attacks, eight years after a truck bombing failed to destroy it.

History

Completed in 1970, the World Trade Center was the tallest building in the world from 1971 to 1973.

On February 26, 1993, a massive truck bomb detonated in the garage of the North Tower of the World Trade Center, killing 6 people and an unborn child and injuring more than one thousand people. The main bomber responsible was Ramzi Yousef, who was captured in 1995 and is now incarcerated for life in federal prison. Yousef had hoped that the truck bomb would knock the North Tower into the South Tower and kill 250,000 people.

In 1998, a Mafia mobster-turned-FBI informant and a friend committed a robbery at the Trade Center's Bank of America.

The World Trade Center was destroyed in the September 11, 2001 attacks, when 10 of 19 al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175 and deliberately crashed them into the Towers. Both towers collapsed an hour after Flight 11 struck. Along with the attack on the Pentagon and the airliner crash in Pennsylvania, the attacks killed 2,996 people. The man most responsible for the attack, Osama bin Ladin, was killed on May 1, 2011 in Pakistan by the U.S. Navy SEALS.

Because all the television shows from the Law & Order franchise are filmed and based in New York City a lot of references have been made to the WTC.

Prior to the attacks, the Law & Order: Special Victims Unit opening sequence featured two separate shots of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. After September 11, the show's opening sequence changed, with generic city shots replacing the World Trade Center. The original shots can be seen in syndicated episodes and the DVD collections of the first two seasons.

A planned miniseries which would have featured Detective Robert Goren and united the casts of Criminal Intent, Special Victims Unit, and the original Law & Order was cancelled because of the events of 9/11. The plotline centered on a terrorist attack using biological weapons.

One of the World Trade Center towers has been rebuilt by 2014, called One World Trade Center.

Post 9/11 References

Law & Order: Criminal Intent

File:Meena Hasni body.jpg

Meena Hasni's body.

Episode: "World's Fair"

  • Wheeler wondered whether the message 4911 next to Meena Hasni's body was a reference to 9/11. According to the Detective on scene, Petey, it would have been the third attack on a Muslim that month. The hate towards Muslims is very clear in this episode.

Episode: "Undaunted Mettle"

  • Noah Preston was an architect working on a design to replace the WTC which he planned to enter in the selection competition. After Preston's murder, Ben Laurette was seen as the favorite to win the commission.
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