Unpublished photographs of the Wold Trade Center attack

ABC News released new photos of the terrible attack which occurred on 11 September 2001 at the World Trade Center in New York.

ABC News filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the National Institute of Standards and Technology in 2009 and the NIST collected the images during an investigation.

The chopper pilots heard reports of people jumping or falling from the building over the radio, but were too far off to understand what was happening.

“We saw things falling but we did were too far away to realise they were people,” he said.

In the air for three hours, Det. Semendinger took three rolls of 36 stills with his personal Minolta Maxxum 7000 camera and another 245 with his digital Olympus U-2100.

He gave his photographs – some of which had already leaked to the Internet – to the 9/11 commission set up to investigate the attack. From there, they made their way to the National Institute of Standards and Technology as part of its probe of the buildings’ collapse.