Regina Askia recounts how she escaped the 9/11 attacks in New York

Former Nollywood star Regina Askia has recounted how she narrowly escaped September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York.

Askia was one of the most popular Nollywood darlings before she relocated to New York in 2011.

Just a few months after relocating to the United States, the former Nollywood actress was on her way to her workplace.

“I was not at the building, I was on my way to work when we saw on TV that my office had exploded,” Askia said during her appearance on Funmi Iyanda’s Public Eye show which is done on Instagram Live.

“I was late for work and because of that I didn't go in.”

She did not state if the office she worked at was at the World Trade Center or the 10 other large surrounding structures that suffered significant damages from the attack.

The 53-year-old is now a family nurse practitioner in New York where she resides with her husband of almost 17 years Rudolph Williams whom she shares two children with- a daughter, Teesa Olympia, and son, Rudolph Junior. Regina has another daughter, Stephanie Hornecker, from a previous relationship.

After 16 years in the United States, Askia in July 2017 became a citizen of the country.

She was one of the on-screen divas of the late 90s after her acting debut in the then-popular NTA series Fortune as Tokunboh Johnson, a role which earned her critical acclaim.

She went on to appear in some of the most defining movies of the 1990s and early 2000s like Most Wanted, Suicide Mission, The President’s Daughter, Festival of Fire, Dangerous Babe, and Man Snatcher.