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29 Mar, 2010 19:25

Expats who went though 9/11 share their experience

Simon Matskeplishvili, cardiologist, and Deidre Dare, “The Moscow News” editor, were in New York during the 9/11 tragedy. After the Moscow bombings, they told RT about their sad double experience.

“A lot of time has passed but I still remember what a terrible experience it was,” Matskeplishvili said. “I was inside when the plane crashed into the north building. I was right on top of the building taking photos, but accidentally went down because I lost my watch. I didn’t realise what happened. I just saw it on TV while a security guard was writing a paper for me about the watch I lost. Then we saw a second plane crash into a second building and ran out.”

“Since then, the world has changed dramatically,” Deidre Dare said. “New York City is a very different place. Since that event, we got involved in two wars which have changed the entire landscape of the world for all of us – politically, economically and socially.”

“For me, what happened today in Moscow was kind of a flashback to 9/11,” she added.

Both guests agreed that such experiences are impossible to forget.

“Times cures everything, but you know somewhere in the subconscious all these things are kept forever. It is difficult to overcome them,” Matskeplishvili said.

“I’m a doctor. My first instinct is to help. For me things like these blasts are really difficulty, because sometimes you stay one week without leaving the hospital to save one life and then some people blow up themselves and they kill so many people at once. It is very frustrating,” Matskeplishvili added.

Dmitry Seleznev is an international lawyer who was working in the US in 2001 and later in London in 2005, when notorious terror attacks happened there. Now he is a Moscow resident.

“It was definitely scarier today than in the US in 2001 or in London in 2005. I was so close to it. It suddenly struck me that it is not a computer game. It is serious, it’s for real, and it is life. It is happening to people I see every day.”

Nevertheless, Simon and Deidre seem far from pessimistic.

“I don’t want to say that the message we should learn from the blasts like these is that we are never safe,” Deidre said. “I still think we are. I still think that the chances to get killed in a car wreck on a Moscow road are more then they are of getting killed in a terrorist attack. But the message you can take out of it: you never know what can happen to you. You shouldn’t be afraid, but you should try to live every day as if it were your last.”

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