‘An act of madness that could have sparked a new 9/11’

AN Irishman whose sister and niece were killed in the attack on the Twin Towers had condemned the now cancelled plan by a US church to burn the Koran today as an act of madness that could have sparked a new 9/11.

Mark Clifford’s sister Ruth McCourt and her four-year-old daughter Juliana were passengers aboard the United Airlines flight which was the second to crash into the twin towers of the World Trade Center.

In a cruel twist of fate, Mark, from Cork, had been told just hours before that his older brother, Ron, had narrowly survived the disaster, despite a near miss when a ball of flaming wreckage fell on the plaza in front of him.