Religious leaders praying during an interfaith service at the USS Arizona Memorial in Honolulu, Hawaii, on Tuesday to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the attacks on Pearl Harbor and Oahu.

Religious leaders from the United States military, Hawaii and Japan gathered there to honour the memory of those killed on Dec 7, 1941, when the Japanese navy attacked the US naval base and other facilities on the island.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe will visit the memorial with US President Barack Obama during his trip to the United States from Dec 26 to 27, and is expected to honour the war dead, but will not apologise for the attack. A top Japanese government spokesman has said that Mr Abe will be the first Japanese leader to visit Pearl Harbor.

The move follows Mr Obama's historic May trip to Hiroshima - the first by a sitting US president - where he spoke of the victims' suffering, but offered no apology for dropping the world's first atomic bomb on the city.