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“I had the feeling that the situation was brought under control very quickly,” Heckner said. <\/p>\n
Keystone-SDA <\/p>\n
The Swiss ambassador to the United States, Ralf Heckner, witnessed first-hand the attack at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in Washington on Saturday night. “I remained calm”, he said in an interview with CH Media published on Monday.\n<\/p>\n
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April 27, 2026 – 09:10\n<\/p>\n
+ Get the most important news from Switzerland in your inbox<\/a><\/p>\n Heckner was in the room, about ten metres from US President Donald Trump, when a thud was heard and security forces reacted immediately.<\/p>\n They quickly removed the American head of state and other members of the government from the room. Those present hid under the tables, while the presumed perpetrator of the attack was brought under control on the upper floor.<\/p>\n + ICE operations divide Swiss Abroad in United States<\/a><\/p>\n Thanks to his strategic position near a main door, Heckner knew where to escape. \u201cI had the feeling that the situation was brought under control very quickly,\u201d he said. \u201cBut a lot of people were very worried.\u201d<\/p>\n Motive and precise objective under investigation<\/p>\n The events planned for the evening went ahead despite the incident, but with reinforced security measures. \u201cIt was not, however, a party with an exuberant atmosphere,\u201d said Heckner.<\/p>\n + Amid trade negotiations, Trump steps up pressure on Switzerland<\/a><\/p>\n Investigators are now looking into the motive and precise aim of the 31-year-old suspect, who tried to storm the event at the Hilton hotel on Saturday evening. The man was armed with a shotgun, a handgun and several knives. According to Trump, a secret service agent was hit by at least one bullet and saved by his bullet-proof vest.<\/p>\n Translated from French with AI\/gw<\/p>\n How we work <\/p>\n This news story has been written and carefully fact-checked by an external editorial team. At SWI swissinfo.ch we select the most relevant news for an international audience and use automatic translation tools such as DeepL to translate it into English. Providing you with automatically translated news gives us the time to write more in-depth articles.<\/p>\n If you want to know more about how we work, have a look\u00a0here<\/a>, if you want to learn more about how we use technology, click\u00a0here<\/a>, and if you have feedback on this news story please write to\u00a0english@swissinfo.ch<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"“I had the feeling that the situation was brought under control very quickly,” Heckner said. Keystone-SDA The Swiss…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":56283,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[4],"tags":[101,5460,301,2143,100,69,103,3381,41,17],"class_list":["post-56282","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-switzerland","tag-article","tag-beat-democracy","tag-beat-foreign-affairs","tag-foreign-affairs","tag-latest-news","tag-politics","tag-production-type-deepl-autotranslation","tag-society","tag-swiss","tag-switzerland"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ch\/116475561495143414","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56282","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=56282"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56282\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/56283"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=56282"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=56282"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=56282"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}