WASHINGTON, United States: It was meant to be a glitzy night with President Donald Trump addressing journalists at a Washington ballroom. But the glamour was shattered by gunshots that left guests diving to the floor and the US leader bundled out by security personnel.
Trump was seated on the stage at the White House Correspondents´ Association´s annual dinner -- the first time he attended as president -- when loud bangs disrupted the revelry and caused him and others to look up in alarm.
AFP journalists attending the event saw chaotic scenes unfolding.
Moments after what sounded like gunshots, cries of “Stay down!” and “Get down!” were heard while guests in black tie and gowns -- including correspondents, officials in the Trump administration and some members of his cabinet -- took cover.
Amid the chaos, the president and First Lady Melania Trump were quickly surrounded by US Secret Service agents, their weapons drawn. They quickly rushed Trump off the stage and through a back curtain as the crowd crouched in shock.
Trump said later he “thought it was a tray going down” before later realizing it was a gun. “It was either a tray or a bullet. I thought I was hoping it was a tray, but it wasn´t.”
The big band music stopped, and for a few seconds a hush fell over the guests.
Agents swarmed around tables as plates crashed to the floor of the massive ballroom of the Washington Hilton, the very hotel where president Ronald Reagan survived an assassination attempt 45 years earlier.
“Shots fired upstairs,” Mehmet Oz, Trump´s administrator of the Centres for Medicare and Medicaid Services, told journalists including AFP as he was evacuated by security.
Also seen being rushed out of the ballroom was Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr -- whose father Robert F Kennedy and uncle president John F Kennedy were felled by assassins´ bullets in the 1960s.
Alexandra Ingersoll, a correspondent for One America News, told AFP she was inside when the commotion began, and saw Secret Service spring into action to protect the president.
