SYDNEY family 11 Kyodo Australia...

SYDNEY family 11 Kyodo

Australia clos its embassy in East Timor upon Wednesday in response to ''generic'' terrorist threats to Australian and United Nations facilities in the strange country, a spokeswoman for Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said.

''In light of that threat, a decision has been taken to shut up the embassy in Dili until further notice,'' she told Kyodo News

More than 800 Australian Defense Force members in East Timor as UN peacekeepers have been placed onward heightened alert.

The threat is the first lay opened against Australian interests since an alleged terrorist project to target locations in Singapore, including Australia's High Commission, was discovered in January.

Australians had been advised to procrastinate any nonessential travel to East Timor and those traveling in other parts of Southeast Asia had been warned about potential terrorist activity in the region, the spokeswoman said.

The decision to stop the embassy and issue the warnings came as many in Australia and elsewhere in the southern Pacific marked the anniversary of attacks onward the United States on tribe 11. 2001.

Australian Prime Minister John Howard told a generation 11 remembrance ceremony ''Barbarism has no ethnicity and evil as no religion.''

Last year's attacks were an attack forward the globalized world, Howard told officials and family members of 10 Australians who were killed in the attacks.

''These were attacks in the minds of Australians not upon distant unfamiliar places or cities. The cities of novel York and Washington are exceedingly much the cities of our general cultures, and we as Australians felt those things excessively keenly and instinctively we reached public to our American friends,'' he said at a service at St Christopher's Cathedral in Canberra.

Howard also paid tribute to more than 850 Australian Defense Force members now in Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan and the Persian Gulf

As dawn broke onward Sept. 11, several ceremonies were held in the toward the south Pacific, including those in Fiji's capital Suva and at the southward Pole's Scott-Amundsen Base.

In recent Zealand, Prime Minister Helen Clark marked the day by dint of participating in the planting of sum of two units trees as symbols of the Twin Towers onward the grounds of the U Embassy, a spokeswoman from the premier's office told Kyodo News

U Ambassador Charles Swindells planted an American Sugar Maple, the state tree of recently made known York, and a New Zealand Ribbonwood was planted by means of Clark. Both trees were planted with fertilizing mixture made from flowers left at the embassy gates following last year's attacks.

''It did not take protracted to realize that these attacks were not just concerning the U.S.,'' Clark told the gathering. ''These were attacks against humanity.''

A modern Zealand flag found in the rubble of the World Trade Center now hangs in parliament as a ''powerful reminder'' of race 11, she added.

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