Ryan Wesley Routh has been named as the suspect in the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump.
New Telegraph had earlier reported that the Secret Service agents saw a man pointing a rifle at the golf course where Trump was apparently located at the time on Sunday.
US media, however, named Routh, a 58-year-old man, who was arrested after the Secret Service agents “opened fire on a gunman” carrying an AK-47 style rifle near the boundary of Trump’s Florida golf course where the former president was golfing on Sunday.
The suspect had bolted out of the shrubbery he had been hiding in and escaped in a black car before he was tracked down by authorities.
It is reported that Routh is a self-employed affordable housing builder in Hawaii and has an arrest record spanning decades and regularly posts on politics and current events, including sometimes criticizing Trump, the Republican presidential candidate.
AFP interviewed Routh in Kyiv in late April 2022, while he was taking part in a demonstration in support of Ukrainians trapped in the port city of Mariupol.
“Putin is a terrorist, and he needs to be ended, so we need everybody from around the world to stop what they are doing and come here now,” he told AFP at the time.