Key events
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov has been speaking to reporters about the Trump rally shooting.
He said:
We do not believe that the attempt to eliminate and assassinate Trump was organised by the current authorities.
But the atmosphere around candidate Trump … provoked what America is confronting today.
After numerous attempts to remove candidate Trump from the political arena – using first legal tools, the courts, prosecutors, attempts to politically discredit and compromise the candidate – it was obvious to all outside observers that his life was in danger.
The Tass news agency reported that Russia’s president Vladimir Putin does not immediately plan to call Trump about the shooting.
An Associated Press analysis of more than a dozen videos and photos from the scene of the Donald Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, as well as satellite imagery of the site, shows the alleged shooter was able to get astonishingly close to the stage.
The roof where the body lay was less than 150 meters from where Trump was speaking. For reference, 150 meters is a distance at which US army recruits must hit a scaled human-sized silhouette to qualify with the M-16 rifle. The AR-15, like the shooter at the Trump rally had, is the semi-automatic civilian version of the military M-16.
Asked at a press conference whether law enforcement did not know the shooter was on the roof until he began firing, Kevin Rojek, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s Pittsburgh Field Office, responded that “that is our assessment at this time”.
“It is surprising” that the gunman was able to open fire on the stage before the Secret Service killed him, he said.
Welcome to our coverage of the aftermath of the assassination attempt on Donald Trump after the dramatic shooting in Pennsylvania on Saturday night.
In a social media post, Trump has said he is “fine” after he was “shot with a bullet that pierced the upper part of my right ear.” The former president, who was attending a campaign rally at Butler Park Showgrounds, was quickly whisked from the stage by Secret Service agents. One attendee was killed and two others critically injured.
The gunman was also killed. The FBI has identified 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks from Bethel Park, Pennsylvania as the “subject involved”.
The assassination attempt has raised questions over failings by security services, and the US Oversight Committee in the Republican-led House of Representatives has summoned Kimberly Cheatle, the secret service director, to testify at a hearing scheduled for 22 July.