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The gunman accused of trying to assassinate Donald Trump hid in the bushes of the former president’s Florida golf club for almost 12 hours, according to officials.
Trump took the fifth hole at his West Palm Beach golf resort at approximately 1.31pm ET on Sunday when Secret Service officials were said to have spotted Ryan Wesley Routh, 58, aiming an SKS-type rifle through a fence.
The suspected gunman was concealed in shrubbery about 400 to 500 yards away from the former president, officials said.
Routh had allegedly been camped out in the bushes equipped with two digital cameras, a black plastic bag of food, and the loaded semi-automatic rifle since 1.59am, according to phone records cited by federal officials.
After waiting in the bushes for almost 11-and-a-half hours, a Secret Service agent began to shoot toward the suspect, causing him to flee the scene before driving off in a Nissan SUV.
Local law enforcement officials tracked down the vehicle Routh fled in after a witness took a photograph of the license plate.
The suspected gunman was later apprehended on I-95 before being taken into custody.
The FBI has accused Routh of attempting to assassinate Trump, marking the second attempt on the former president’s life in as many months.
On Monday afternoon, police released dramatic video footage showing the moment of Routh’s arrest.
The alleged would-be assassin stood before magistrate Judge Ryon M McCabe at the federal courthouse in West Palm Beach on Monday and was charged with two gun offences.
Routh’s criminal record dates back to at least 2002, when he was convicted of possession of a weapon of mass death and destruction in Greensboro, North Carolina. He faced almost 100 previous charges, officials said.
Hours after the alleged attempt on his life, Trump gave a first-hand account of the incident during an interview with Fox News.
“Their [Harris campaign] rhetoric is causing me to be shot at, when I am the one who is going to save the country, and they are the ones that are destroying the country – both from the inside and out,” he said.
As he launched his new cryptocurrency platform World Liberty Financial from his Mar-a-Lago resort in a separate address on Twitter/X Spaces on Monday evening, Trump once again claimed that he had survived the two attempts on his life because God wants him to “save the country”.
