BEIRUT: Ten years after the Sept. 11 attacks, Beirutis remember very well what they were doing on that day, how they received the news, and some say that questions remain over what really happened.

“That day I was in the south,” said 28-year-old Rana Rizk, from Hasbaya. “We heard it on the news, everybody started talking about it, it was really shocking … I thought it was the end of the world.”

“And then the electricity went off,” she said, laughing. “So we couldn’t see more of what happened.”

Walking toward Sassine Square, Sibylle Zantout, 35, said she was studying in Paris at the time. “I didn’t go to class, I stayed home, and watched TV all day.”

“Sept. 11 is like [former Prime Minister Rafik] Hariri’s assassination,” she said. “Everyone remembers what they were doing that day.”

Thirty-seven year-old Nada Hayek heard the news from a colleague. “I was at work, just here,” she said, pointing at a building in Hamra.

She said that she thought World War III was about to start. “But in fact, life continued.”

Ghassan Mansour, 36, said he heard the news at work but didn’t see images before returning home. “I thought about it all day and was waiting to go home to see it on TV. I was astonished.”

But although Mansour describes the attacks as a “tragedy,” there are some points he doesn’t really understand.

“I heard that Jewish people knew about it [the attacks beforehand] … did you hear about that?”

He is also not very convinced about the role Osama Bin Laden played and thinks the man who claimed responsibility for the attacks might only be a “U.S. creation.” Before positing his theory, he turned to a friend standing by to check some facts “They killed him, true?”

“Al-Qaedais against the U.S. so they said ‘we did it’ but come on,” he said, smiling. “How can something like that happen in the U.S., with their FBI and all their technology … how is that possible?”

In Moseitebeh, 30-year-old Rasha Fawaz also said she thinks the story “is not clear.”

“I was at home when I heard the news, and I first thought it was a catastrophe because as usual, they would accuse the Arabs, who are supposed to be terrorists,” the special education teacher said.

“I followed the news and heard [that] Arabs [were] being accused as usual, and then I heard there were no Jews inside … It wasn’t very clear what happened,” she added.

However she said she doesn’t believe the perception of Arabs in the West has changed since Sept. 11. “Arabs were always accused of being terrorists, even before,” Fawaz said.

But Laila Asad, from Saudi Arabia, who was studying in the U.S. at the time, doesn’t agree.

She noticed that people’s behavior toward Arabs “really changed a lot” in the U.S. after the attacks.

Waiting for her driver in Ashrafieh, the 28-year-old said she was in Washington D.C. on that day and remembers thinking she was watching a movie when she saw the first images of what happened. “I changed channels, and saw the same images everywhere … I couldn’t imagine it was real,” she said.

Alaa, a 32-year-old accountant in Clemenceau who prefered not to give his last name, didn’t mistake the attacks for a movie, but didn’t believe it either. “At first I really thought it was a joke,” he said, remembering that he thought it impossible for a plane to fly into a skyscraper.

But after realizing it was true, he said he just saw it as a “normal news story.”

“People die every day, it’s normal. Life didn’t stop on Sept. 11.” “For us for example, we can be sitting here and suddenly Israel attacks. That’s bigger news to us,” he added.

A 25-year-old man working in Hamra, who asked not to be named, shared this philosophy. “There are more important things happening in the word,” he said.

“I saw it on TV, it was a tragedy for [the] American people, something like that happening on their soil,” he said, in a rather mechanical voice.

When asked if he was being ironic, he smiled and admitted, “Yes, a little.” He got serious again and added, “No it was a tragedy. But every country has its own problems.”

In Lebanon, he said, “we’re used to it … the 2006 war was also a tragedy … But Lebanon is not the U.S.”

In Moseitebeh, a young man said, “it is known that Bin Laden had links with America. … It’s all a game.”

“He who prepares poison will end up knowing its taste,” he added, as a friend passing by interjected that the attacks “made us very happy.”

Fifty-year-old Hussein Mansour, who owns a mechanics shop in the neighborhood of Moseitebeh, said he was in the exact same place when he heard about the attacks.

“We were all very surprised and all were against what happened,” he said, while insisting he does not hold negative opinions of Americans.

“The problem is not the American people, all people are the same, they’re like us,” he continued. “The problem is the way their government behaves.”