Former US President Donald Trump suffered a new assassination attempt this Sunday when an individual, who was detained by the Secret Service and did not fire a shot, approached the golf course where the Republican candidate was playing, armed with an AK-47 rifle with a telescopic sight.
According to the criteria of
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) confirmed that what happened in the Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Florida, is being investigated for an apparent “attempted murder.”
The detainee is a 58-year-old man named Ryan Wesley Routh. CNN and ABC describe him as a homebuilder in Hawaii who had a decades-long arrest record and who posted regularly about politics and current affairs, often criticizing former President Trump.
This is what the apparent assassination attempt on Donald Trump looked like
The incident occurred around 1:30 p.m. local time on Sunday. And the first thing that was known from the Republican campaign, a few minutes later, was that the former president (2017-2021) was fine.
“Shots were fired near me, but before the rumors start to get out of hand, I want you to hear this first: I AM SAFE AND WELL!” Trump later said in a statement.
In a second message, Trump said that “his determination (to return to the White House) is even stronger after another assassination attempt” and invited his followers to vote for him in the presidential elections on November 5.
At a press conference, Sheriff Ric Bradshaw offered the first official details and it was learned that It was Secret Service agents who spotted a man with a rifle standing near the fence of Trump’s golf course, where he was playing, about 300-500 yards away.
The Secret Service shot him and he ran from some bushes where he was hiding to the vehicle he tried to escape in, a black pickup truck whose license plate a witness managed to photograph.
Thanks to this, The individual was arrested a few minutes later on the road aboard his vehicle. The gun was found in the bushes, along with two backpacks and a GoPro sports camera.
Sentences and weapons, the profile of Ryan Wesley Routh
The suspect is a 58-year-old man who is very active on social media named Ryan Wesley Routh and has lived in North Carolina and Hawaii.
In 2002, according to court records accessed by several media outlets, he was convicted of possession of a weapon of mass destruction: a fully automatic machine gun.
Records also show convictions for carrying a concealed weapon, possession of stolen property and hit-and-run.
According to NBC, more than 100 criminal charges have been filed against Ryan Routh in North Carolina.
Routh was heavily involved in Ukraine’s war against Russia and visited the European country in 2022.
Routh claimed to be a contractor who had left everything behind at the start of the war to travel to kyiv and support Ukraine, and he wrote to several congressmen asking for support for his idea. According to news agencies that interviewed him, he proposed recruiting thousands of Afghan soldiers who had been left jobless after NATO’s withdrawal from Afghanistan into the Ukrainian army.
I am ready to fly to Krakow and go to the Ukrainian border as a volunteer to fight and die.
In addition to trying to sell his plan to the Ukrainian authorities, who always distanced themselves from Routh’s attempts to officially associate his name with Ukrainehe also presented himself as a recruiter for the Ukrainian Army, which also denied his legitimacy to play such a role.
Specifically, Routh presented himself as a recruiter for the International Legion, created by the Ukrainian government to attract fighters. foreigners interested in fighting with Ukraine in exchange for money.
“I am ready to fly to Krakow and go to the Ukrainian border as a volunteer to fight and die,” Routh wrote on Platform X in March 2022, according to The New York Times.
At the end of April 2022, the AFP He also interviewed Routh in kyiv at a rally in support of Ukrainians trapped in the port city of Mariupol.
“Putin is a terrorist and he must be terminated, so we need everyone to stop what they are doing and come here now,” he told the AFP so.
The detainee’s son told CNN that it is not like his father to “do something crazy, much less violent.” “I don’t know what happened in Florida, and I hope things have just been blown out of proportion,” he told the outlet.
Police said at the press conference that the golf course is surrounded by bushes and that when someone hides in them they are practically “out of sight.”
Security is limited to the area the Secret Service deems feasible, they said, and the organization “did what it had to do.”
Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’ reactions
US President Joe Biden said in a statement on Sunday that he was “relieved” to hear that Trump was unharmed and praised the work of the Secret Service.
Through X, Vice President and Democratic candidate Kamala Harris, who will face Trump at the polls in 51 days, said she was glad the former president was safe. “Violence has no place in America,” she said.
Also through X, Trump’s running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, She explained that she spoke to him before the news was made public and that “he was surprisingly in good spirits.”
“There is still a lot we don’t know, but tonight I will hug my children very tightly and say a prayer of gratitude,” she said.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said the state will conduct its own investigation into the attempted assassination of the former president.
“People deserve to know the truth about the would-be assassin and how he managed to get within 500 meters of the former president,” the Republican governor wrote in X.
People deserve to know the truth about the possible assassin and how he managed to get within 500 meters of the former president.
The result of this Sunday’s attempted murder was very different from what happened on July 13, when Trump was injured during a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, after a 20-year-old man shot him with a rifle, wounding him in the right ear.
The Secret Service shot and killed the attacker, who fired from a high position outside the compound, where one member of the audience died from a gunshot wound.
The incident led to numerous resignations over security breaches, including that of the then director of the US Secret Service, Kimberly Cheatle.
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