Three Uzbek-born victims remembered 25 years after 9/11 attacks
Three people born in Uzbekistan were among the victims of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States, according to memorial records and contemporary reporting.
Irina Kolpakova, Gavkharoy Kamardinova and Gary Shamay were all killed at the World Trade Center in New York. Voice of America has also identified the three as victims with ties to Uzbekistan.
Their names are among the 2,977 people killed in the attacks, which were carried out by al-Qaeda hijackers at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and aboard United Airlines Flight 93. The victims came from about 90 countries, according to the National September 11 Memorial & Museum.
The stories of the three Uzbekistan-born victims followed very different paths to New York.
Kolpakova, 37, had immigrated from Uzbekistan and worked for law firm Harris Beach LLP in the South Tower. She was an assistant performing largely clerical work and worked on the 85th floor, according to a memorial profile. Her son, Arsen Kolpakov, was 19 at the time.
Harris Beach later said Kolpakova was among six people connected to the firm who were killed that day. The company subsequently established an annual remembrance award and scholarship in memory of those it lost.
Gavkharoy Kamardinova had recently started a new job
Gavkharoy Kamardinova, 26, was born in Uzbekistan and moved to the United States to study at the Spanish-American Institute before settling in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, according to the 9/11 Memorial & Museum.
In early September 2001, she started working as a salesperson for New York grocery business Amish Market. On September 11, she was staffing a food cart in Aon Corp.‘s offices on the 98th floor of the South Tower.
One of the objects now held by the museum is Kamardinova’s temporary World Trade Center identification card, issued less than two weeks before the attacks. Her family later donated it to the museum’s collection.
People who knew Kamardinova in Brooklyn later remembered her as a young woman who had come to the United States to study and work. Uzbek-language Voice of America reporting said members of the local Uzbek community continued to remember her years after the attacks.
The third victim, Gary Shamay, was 23. He was born in Uzbekistan and moved to Brooklyn with his family when he was 2, according to a memorial profile based on reporting published after the attacks.
Shamay graduated from Sheepshead Bay High School at 16 and built a career in technology, working at companies including Allstate Insurance, Deutsche Bank and CIBC Oppenheimer. He joined Cantor Fitzgerald in 2000 while continuing college studies towards a bachelor’s degree in computer engineering.
He was working for Cantor Fitzgerald at the World Trade Center on September 11. The company lost hundreds of employees in the attack.
Kazakhstan also lost a citizen at the World Trade Center
Central Asia’s connection to the tragedy extended beyond Uzbekistan.
Zhanetta Tsoi, a 32-year-old citizen of Kazakhstan, was killed after moving to the United States with her daughter to begin a new life in New York, according to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.
Tsoi, an ethnic Korean from Kazakhstan, had received a U.S. green card and secured a position with insurance and risk management company Marsh & McLennan at the World Trade Center. She began work on September 10, 2001, one day before the attacks.
Her parents, Raisa and Valentin Tsoi, were in Almaty when they watched the events unfold on television. In 2001 that she was the only Kazakh citizen officially listed as missing after the World Trade Center attack. Her death was later confirmed.
The National September 11 Memorial in New York now carries the names of the victims around two reflecting pools built in the footprints of the Twin Towers.
Twenty-five years after the attacks, their individual stories offer a Central Asian dimension to an event whose victims represented dozens of nationalities and immigrant communities. The 9/11 Memorial & Museum marked the anniversary this week with its annual commemoration in New York.
