Fireworks over the Opera House during New Year’s eve celebrations in Sydney, Thursday.

SYDNEY: A dazzling display of fireworks lit up Sydney Harbor on Thursday as Australia’s biggest city welcomed the New Year in spectacular style, defying terrorist fears days after a deadly siege.

From Hong Kong to London, New York to Rio, millions around the world celebrated when the clock ticked past midnight, ringing in 2015 with massive fireworks displays, concerts and light shows.

In Sydney, rocked by deadly drama just before Christmas when an Iranian-born gunman with a history of violence and extremism took 17 hostages in the city’s financial hub, tons of fireworks exploded over the harbor with an expected attendance of 1.6 million people.

Lord Mayor Clover Moore said the two hostages who died — cafe manager Tori Johnson and barrister Katrina Dawson — will be remembered with floral tributes on the pylons of the Harbor Bridge.

“We are celebrating that we are a multicultural, harmonious community but we will be thinking about what happened,” she said.

Across Asia, millions partied with Hong Kong’s dazzling skyline along Victoria Harbor that lit up during an eight-minute pyrotechnic display.

In Taiwan, the landmark skyscraper Taipei 101 was at the center of celebrations, with performances by pop singers and a firework display at midnight that attract hundreds of thousands.

In Japan, the Meiji Jingu shrine in Tokyo brought out stocks of lucky charms and set up large offertory boxes as it prepared to welcome a huge wave of worshippers overnight.

The gigantic shrine expects three million visitors in the first three days of the new year.

In Afghanistan, the date brought the last day of NATO’s combat mission in the war-weary nation, with a new “train and support” mission to begin as the conflict against the Taleban still rages.

Meanwhile in Berlin, the end of another era was remembered with “Baywatch” star David Hasselhoff joining a huge open air concert in front of the Brandenburg Gate where he famously sang for freedom after the Berlin Wall fell 25 years ago.

In Paris, the Champs-Elysees was reserved for pedestrians to allow them to watch a visual spectacle projected onto the Arc de Triomphe 15 minutes before the start of the new year.

In Spain, millions of revellers descended on Madrid’s Puerta del Sol to eat the traditional 12 grapes for each stroke of midnight while in Barcelona a massive fireworks display was held.

London staged New Year’s Eve fireworks along the River Thames but this year there was a fee after crowd numbers raised safety concerns in recent years.

Edinburgh held its traditional Hogmanay street party along the Royal Mile with tens of thousands of people in attendance.

Marking 2015 on Copacabana beach in Rio de Janeiro more than two million people attended a huge fireworks show that opened celebrations marking 450 years since the founding of the city.

And in New York, approximately one million revellers descended on Times Square to watch the New Year’s Eve Ball Drop.

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