Ledbury'S Liana Pavlimbey has made contact with her cousin after an anxious wait to see if she had been caught up in the World Trade Centre horror.

Mrs Pavlimbey spent three days phoning New York as she tried to find news of relative Daphne Moustaka following the recent terrorist attack.

She finally made contact again last Friday, September 14, when Mrs Pavlimbey of the Frydays chip shop, in The Homend, discovered Daphne had witnessed the attack and had only just survived.

Mrs Pavlimbey said of her personal ordeal: "I was still serving people and smiling. But I didn't sleep for three nights."

With husband Loucas, she collected 500 signatures from customers in a Book of Condolence, posted yesterday (Thursday) to President Bush.

If her cousin, Daphne Moustaka, had been only minutes late for work on September 11, she would not have survived.

Her parked car was buried under rubble.

Mrs Moustaka worked in the American Express building next to the Twin Towers. She saw the first jet crash into the skyscraper and explode, and felt the power of the second impact, which she said was "like an earthquake".

It took Mrs Moustaka two hours to get to the ground floor. She then faced a nine-hour walk to her home in the Estoria region of New York.