Palm Beach police have arrested a man armed with a set of knives near President Donald Trump’s Florida resort. US media emphasized he is an Iranian national while bringing up a non-existent $80mn Iranian ‘bounty’ on Trump’s head, Sputnik reports.
The man had no known address and was detained on the Flagler Memorial Bridge on Friday morning. He had “several knives” and an undisclosed amount of cash on him, according to WPTV.
Other local outlets claimed the man’s arsenal included a machete, two knives, a pick axe and $22,000 in cash, and that a bomb squad was searching his vehicle, found at the Palm Beach International Airport.
The now-deleted photos by a WPEC-TV reporter showed a Saturn getting towed away from the parking garage, with ‘I’m Germany’ [sic] written on the back window.
The arrest comes just days after Iran fired missiles at two US bases in Iraq, in revenge for the US drone attack that killed Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps General Qassem Soleimani at the Baghdad international airport. There were no casualties in the strikes and both Trump and Iran chose not to escalate the situation any further.
There were multiple reports in Western media that Iran had offered a $80 million bounty for the killing of Trump, but those reports were based on comments made by an unidentified mourner at Soleimani’s funeral, rather than an actual government announcements.
The bridge where the suspect was arrested is less than 5 kilometers (3 miles) north of Mar-a-Lago, the resort Trump favors on the weekends and holidays. Federal officials were involved in the investigation, according to WPBF-TV.
Mar-a-Lago has been a popular destination for tourists hoping to get a glimpse of the US president. In two instances so far, Chinese tourists that made their way to the private club grounds have been detained by the authorities. A 56-year-old woman was arrested for trespassing on December 18, while a 33-year-old pleaded guilty to an earlier trespassing incident in April.
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