Survivors of 9/11 who battled cancer and other life-threatening illnesses in the years since the attacks were devastated and enraged to learn that the terror plot’s mastermind and two co-conspirators will escape the death penalty.
Several victims, whose ailments were brought on by toxic debris from the felled Twin Towers, on Thursday slammed the plea deals that US military prosecutors struck with three accused terrorists held on Guantánamo Bay, including primary plotter Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
“I’m disgusted. He killed 3,000 people and more than 3,000 if you consider all of the people who have been dying since he caused all of this pain and suffering,” Steven Hanges, a retired 20-year veteran of the NY Highway Patrol, who was diagnosed with thyroid cancer late last year.
“That man, at the very least, should get the same that he gave us,” Hanges told The Post of Mohammed.
Hanges, who began developing pulmonary symptoms in the weeks after 9/11 and has suffered from rhinitis, sinusitis and obstructive sleep apnea in the years since, has had his tumor removed and is doing well. But the news of the plea deals brought the emotional pain right back.
“They made a deal with the devil,” he said.
Edgardo Lopez, 57, an ex-NYPD officer and 9/11 first responder who got throat cancer and lost a vocal cord from an aggressive course of chemotherapy and radiation, said the defendants should have gotten “an automatic death sentence right off the bat.”
“There should have never been a plea deal,” he said.
“I’m an eye for an eye type person,” he added. “If you commit a heinous act, causing the death of not one but about 3,000 people … nah, I don’t think so. They got it easy.”
Despite getting both prostate and skin cancer since the attacks, retired FDNY Deputy Chief Al Santora said he considers himself “one of the lucky ones” compared to others who were in and around Ground Zero on that fateful Tuesday.
Santora and his wife, Maureen, lost their son Christopher, 23, an FDNY firefighter who was killed in the attacks.
The couple was blindsided by the terrorists’ plea deal, only learning about it when they started getting calls from reporters.
“I think we’re spending a lot of time and effort for something unnecessary,” he said, referring to the suspects’ protracted cases which have lasted over 20 years.
“They could have been tried, and what I think is they should have been put to death.”
Richie Alles, 67, a retired Deputy FDNY Chief who was diagnosed with prostate cancer last November, said those who have been battling 9/11 illnesses “all consider ourselves ticking time bombs,” grimly acknowledging that “it’s not a question of if, but when you’re going to get an illness.”
He said he wasn’t surprised by his diagnosis, and has so far been managing it as best he can.
“At least I’m still here to be able to tell the story,” he said.
Alles said he believes the US Justice Department “has done a disservice to families who lost loved ones on 9/11, as well as the families of the innocent first responders and survivors who have been sickened with cancers in the aftermath.”
It wasn’t just first responders who contracted illnesses from being in close proximity to the attacks.
Michael Barasch, 69, managing partner at the Butler Associated Law Firm, was and still is a lawyer at 11 Park Place, where he represents firefighters. He’s also a legal advocate for the Feal Good Foundation, which works to help emergency personnel who were injured or sickened on the job.
Barasch, who was diagnosed with prostate cancer five years ago and skin cancer last year, said “not a day goes by” without one or two of his clients dying of a 9/11-related illness.
“Six-thousand people have now had their deaths linked to 9/11-illnesses. Double the amount of people who died that day. I’ve been hearing from these clients and they’re outraged. They waited 23 years for their day in court — it’s not just the defendants’ day in court, it’s the victims’ day in court.”
He said the plea deal “denies 9/11 families that long awaited opportunity. It denies them the justice they deserve.”
Department heads and union bosses of first responder agencies suffered enormous casualties in the terror attacks, many of them from cancer or other diseases years later.
The Port Authority lost 84 employees on 9/11 including 37 Port Authority police officers, and those losses have only been compounded by the growing list of colleagues who succumb to diseases they contracted after the attacks, said Port Authority PBA president Frank Conti.
“This plea agreement is not justice. Instead, it represents a failure of the system to bring these murderers to trial for more than 20 years,” he said.
“These men are responsible for the outright murder of 2,977 men, women and children on that terrible day. They are also responsible for many hundreds more who have succumbed to disease over these past two decades.”
The FDNY lost 343 members on Sept. 11, 2001 and more perish all the time from diseases the aftermath of the attack stirred up.
Andy Ansbro, President of the FDNY Uniformed Firefighters Association — whose NYPD Transit Division chief father died last June of 9/11-related illness after a multi-year cancer fight — said the union is “shocked and disgusted” that the US government would offer the terror suspects a plea deal.
“Every month we are losing firefighters to 9/11 illnesses. We are disgusted that they allowed this to happen without seeing this through to executions.”
Jim Brosi, head of the Uniformed Fire Officers Association, echoed the anger of other groups and agencies, calling the plea deal “outrageous.”
Firefighters continue to die as a result of these attacks orchestrated by these terrorists … it’s difficult to imagine why this plea deal was offered to monsters who caused the death of nearly 3,000 people, and whose crimes continue to take the lives of those exposed to the harmful effects of Ground Zero,” he said.
“Where is the justice we’ve been promised for 23 years?”
— Additional reporting by Larry Celona
