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By Marlowe Hood

PARIS — A mix of sprinkling system water and melted aluminium from aircraft hulls likely triggered the explosions that felled New York’s Twin Towers on September 11, 2001, a materials expert has told a technology conference.

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“If my theory is correct, tonnes of aluminium ran down through the towers, where the smelt came into contact with a few hundred litres of water,” Christian Simensen, a scientist at SINTEF, an independent technology research institute based in Norway, said in a statement released Wednesday.

“From other disasters and experiments carried out by the aluminium industry, we know that reactions of this sort lead to violent explosions.”

The official report blames the collapse on the over-heating and failure of the structural steel beams at the core of the buildings, an explanation Simensen rejects.

Given the quantities of the molten metal involved, the blasts would have been powerful enough to blow out an entire section of each building, he said.