Estimated read time: Less than a minute
This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use. Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. Reading or replaying the story in its archived form does not constitute a republication of the story.
Former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher will attend events in Washington to mark the fifth anniversary of the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, her office said on Friday.
The 80-year-old baroness will on September 11 attend a church service and a commemorative ceremony with US Vice President Dick Cheney, who invited her to Washington.
The ceremony will take place at 8:46 am (12:46 GMT), the precise time when members of the Al-Qaeda terror network crashed the first hijacked plane into the World Trade Centre in New York.
Afterwards Thatcher will attend a ceremony at the State Department, where she will meet US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
The trip will be Thatcher's first to the United States since she attended the funeral of former US secretary of defence Caspar Weinberger in April.
Thatcher was Britain's prime minister from 1979 to 1990 and formed a close partnership with then US president Ronald Reagan, who died in 1994.
She holds the presidential medal of freedom, one of the two highest United States civilian awards.
rjm/mt/gil
US-attacks-5years-Britain-Thatcher
AFP 081740 GMT 09 06
COPYRIGHT 2006 Agence France-Presse. All rights reserved.
