The US police ordered the evacuation of the Capitol in Washington after having considered a harmless plane participating in a sporting event as a threat.
“Evacuate the United States Capitol”indicated a first police alert issued at 18:30 local (22:30 GMT) in the face of a potential air threatbefore being picked up less than 20 minutes later.
The public force, which justified the evacuation “as a precautionary measure,” promised to provide “more information.” More than two hours after the initial notice, they still offered no explanation.
but a simple communication problem seems to have caused the false alert.
The threat was actually a group of US Army paratroopers, dropped from a plane as part of a show before a baseball game, less than 2 kilometers from the Capitol.
“The fact that the US aviation authority has apparently failed to notify the Capitol Police about the planned flyover of Nationals Stadium is shocking and inexcusable,” said House Speaker Pelosi.
“The useless panic caused by this apparent negligence was particularly damaging to their representatives, staff and institutional employees, still affected by the trauma of the attack on their workplace on January 6,” he added, referring to the assault on Capitol Hill by supporters. of Donald Trump in 2021.
very stressful
Although very brief, the alert was immediately shared by US media in a country that still remembers the attacks of September 11, 2001, when planes piloted by members of Al-Qaeda crashed into the towers of the World Trade Center in New York, and at the Pentagon building in Washington.
It is likely that there were few people inside the Capitol on Wednesday, given that there were no sessions of the Senate or the House of Representatives.
“We have just experienced a very stressful quarter of an hour, but we are happy that everyone is safe and sound,” Congresswoman Teresa Leger Fernandez tweeted.
According to CNN journalist Ryan Nobles, who claims to have been among the evacuees, “for a good fifteen minutes he was pretty crazy.”
“The alarms were loud and intense, and the Capitol Police were going to great lengths to get everyone out,” he tweeted.
Two Swiss tourists who visited the surroundings of the Capitol explained having found themselves in front of “police officers who said they had to get away from the building.”
“They closed the security barriers behind us,” one of them told AFP, specifying that the agents did not give them any explanations.
The building, a symbol of American democracy, has been under heavy surveillance since on January 6, 2021, some supporters of former Republican president Donald Trump entered it with the intention of preventing him from validating the result of the presidential elections won by the Democrat. Joe Biden.