A man appeared to light himself on fire Friday afternoon outside a New York City courthouse where jury selection was underway in former President Donald Trump’s criminal trial.
The man soaked himself with an accelerant around 1:35 p.m. EST right across the street from the courthouse in Collect Pond Park and reportedly “threw pamphlets into the air before” carrying out the act of self-immolation.
“A man has emblazoned himself outside the courthouse just now,” a CNN reporter said live on air as camera crews quickly turned to film the incident.
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Emergency crews rushed in to extinguish the fire and the person was carried away on a stretcher by first responders and loaded into an ambulance.
The incident happened right as the court was being dismissed for a break, CNN reported.
GRAPHIC WARNING:
BREAKING: A man sets himself ON FIRE behind CNN outside the New York City Courthouse.
"I can smell the burn of some sort of flesh."
"I see a totally charred human being." pic.twitter.com/fHqZaBt33P— Nicholas Fondacaro (@NickFondacaro) April 19, 2024
The incident comes two months after a far-left extremist lit himself on fire outside the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C., an event that was used by Islamic terrorist groups to promote propaganda.
Aaron Bushnell, a low-level software engineer in the U.S. Air Force, screamed “Free Palestine!” as flames engulfed his body after he doused himself with a flammable liquid and lit himself on fire. He later died from his injuries.
Bushnell repeated terrorist propaganda in the moments leading up to the incident, falsely claiming that what was happening inside Gaza was a “genocide” and calling Israel “colonizers.”
The Iranian-backed terrorist group Hamas said in a statement that they expressed their “deepest condolences and our full solidarity with the family and friends” of Bushnell, “whose name has been immortalized as a defender of human values and the oppression of the Palestinian people who are suffering because of the American administration and its unjust policies.”
The terrorist group claimed that President Joe Biden was responsible for Bushnell’s death, called Israel a “Nazi Zionist entity” and falsely accused Israel of waging a “war of extermination against our Palestinian people”.
The statement concluded by calling Bushnell’s actions “heroic” and said that Israel’s leaders were “Nazis.”
In his suicide note, Bushnell included his gender pronouns.
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