Bells tolled in a beachfront neighborhood in Queens, New York City, as families bearing red roses and photographs gathered Sunday to mark the fifth anniversary of the crash of American Airlines Flight 587 that killed 265 people on board and on ground.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg gathered with family of the 265 people killed aboard the flight bound for the Dominican Republic to dedicate a curved, 2-million-dollar memorial wall bearing the victims' names.

"It is a place to which we can always return to read the names of those we lost five yeas ago, to share our sorrow and our memories, and to contemplate the eternal beauty and grandeur of the skies and the seas," Bloomberg said Sunday.

A firefighter and police officer rang bells at 9:16 a.m., to mark the moment the plane crashed into the Queens neighborhood minutes after takeoff from John F. Kennedy International airport.

The memorial wall has windows and a doorway offering views of the ocean. It also bears a quote, in English and Spanish, from the writings of Dominican poet Pedro Mir: "Afterwards I want only peace."

The Nov. 12, 2001, crash killed 260 people on board and five people in the quiet neighborhood of Belle Harbor, Queens, further rattling a city still shaken by the attacks on the World Trade Center just two months earlier. Many of the victims resided in Washington Heights, a heavily Dominican neighborhood in Manhattan.

The National Transportation Safety Board determined that the tail of the Airbus A300 had fallen off, and the agency blamed pilot error, inadequate pilot training and overly sensitive rudder controls. But many victims' families were not convinced and said the explanation was too simplistic.

The crash was the second deadliest in U.S. aviation history.

Source: Xinhua