“I reported the attacker, but they did nothing” –

“I told the Secret Service agents that there was a man with a rifle on the roof but they continued to watch us without doing anything”. The interview with a Trump supporter who witnessed the shooting in which former US President Donald Trump was injured during the rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, has gone viral on social media. The testimony was collected by a BBC journalist who was on site. “We were having a party,” said the man, still wearing the red hat with ‘Trump’ written on it, “and when we heard Trump speaking we went out and approached the field, near the trees. We mightn’t see him but we might hear him”. “At a certain point,” he added, “we noticed a guy who was crawling on a roof, armed with a rifle, he was regarding fifty meters away from us. We looked carefully at that guy, you might clearly see he had a rifle. The police were all around and we said ‘Hey, there’s a guy with a rifle over there’, but they reacted like ‘what’s happening?’ and they didn’t do anything, they just looked at me, while I kept saying ‘look at the guy on the roof.’

“I thought,” the man continued, “why does Trump keep talking? Why didn’t they take him off the stage? In the meantime, I continued to stare at that guy on the roof, I did it for like two or three minutes, while the Secret Service was watching us. And at a certain point I heard five shots.” The images spread on social media show the attacker, later killed, in a shooting position while Trump was busy with his rally. If the testimony were confirmed, it would demonstrate serious security flaws for the candidate at the White House.