New York leaders ‘lied’ about toxic air after 9/11, Mayor Zohran Mamdani says

New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced on Tuesday the release of tens of thousands of documents showing the city did not disclose all it knew about air toxicity after September 11.

The release comes ahead of the 25th anniversary of the attacks in 2001 that killed 2,977 people, in the US, mostly in the collapse of the Twin Towers in New York.

More than 9,400 have died from illnesses linked to their exposure to the area in the years since, according to a federal medical monitoring programme.

“These are documents that show what the city knew about the toxic air around Ground Zero, when they knew it, and how they acted to limit liability,” the mayor told a news conference following the online release of 170,000 pages of documents on health concerns, air quality and the city’s response to the attacks.

The release is part of an agreement with 9/11 Health Watch, a victims’ advocacy group that had taken legal action to compel the city to make the documents public.

“For 25 years, four different mayoral administrations kept from the public, the US Congress, and the City Council documents showing what the city actually knew about the danger of the toxic chemicals in Lower Manhattan and Western Brooklyn after the World Trade Centre collapse, even as city officials continued messaging to the public that the air was ‘safe and acceptable’,” the group’s director Benjamin Chevat said in a statement.