MONICA GABRIELLE gives a mesmerising account of how her husband of 28 years was killed in the collapse of the south tower of the World Trade Centre.

“Rich worked on the 103rd floor. He made it to the 78th floor Sky Lobby,” she said. “While they were waiting, the second plane hit. There were a lot of dead and injured. He was pinned under marble debris and his legs were crushed. He had to wait because they could not get him out.”

The small audience in the library of a primary school in a suburb of Detroit, let out a collective gasp. One woman wiped away a tear. Then Mrs Gabrielle turned stridently political, taking aim directly at President Bush. “The President is out stumping, saying he is a wartime president and he is making this country safer,” she said. “I am here to tell you that he has not.” For the p ast three weeks Mrs Gabrielle, a former advertising consultant from Connecticut who used to lean to the Right, has criss-crossed America to deliver a similar speech — often twice a day — as part of Senator John Kerry’s campaign to oust Mr Bush from office. Being a “September 11 widow” confers a grim celebrity in America as the nation grapples with the implications of the worst attack in its history. Now some of those widows and other grieving family members are hitting the campaign trail in the hope of influencing the outcome of the November 2 election. “President Bush is claiming, as one of his main campaign arguments, that he has been a successful leader of the war on terrorism,” said Marilynn Rosenthal, a University of Michigan sociology professor who lost her son Josh in the twin towers. “That is just nonsense, absolute nonsense.”

Perhaps it was inevitable that such a closely fought election would open divisions among the families of the nearly 3,000 people killed on September 11, 2001. Mrs Gabrielle and four widows from New Jersey — dubbed the “Jersey girls” — last month endorsed Mr Kerry, accusing Mr Bush of a misguided invasion of Iraq.

A separate group, “September 11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows”, also opposes the war in Afghanistan. “The terrorism of September 11 has been neither neutralised, nor ended, by the terrorism of war,” it said.

But more than 200 September 11 relatives have signed an open letter supporting Mr Bush. “Three years ago, George W. Bush stood with us and vowed that he would ‘Never forget’,” the letter declares. “We stand with him now.”

The group, “9/11 Families for a Safe and Strong America”, was set up in August to highlight the contacts between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein revealed by the official September 11 investigation. Its moving force, Debra Burlingame, a former Democratic voter whose brother Charles was the pilot of the flight that crashed into the Pentagon, appeared with two September 11 widows at the Republican convention in August. She described Mrs Gabrielle and the other widows campaigning for Mr Kerry as “rock stars of grief”. “They have had seemingly a ‘Blame America, blame Bush’ attitude,” the group’s co-founder, Tim Sumner, who lost his brother-in-law, said. “I can understand the grief and anger. But we always blamed the terrorists first.”

For both political parties, the September 11 widows are a potent weapon in winning support of swing voters known as “security moms”. Jim Karavite, the Democratic Party’s precinct captain in Huntington Woods, said his canvassing had confirmed that many “soccer moms” who might have voted Democrat were leaning to Mr Bush over terrorism. Mrs Gabrielle has travelled to the swing states of Ohio, Iowa, Wisconsin, Florida, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Michigan. “I will forgo sleep,” she said. “I haven’t slept for three years. Three more weeks won’t make a difference.”

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