While covering events in Minneapolis on Saturday, MSNBC host Ali Velshi was hit with tear gas fired by police, which Velshi said was done with “no provocation” and “nothing that happened whatsoever.”
Velshi said, “Nobody was doing anything. They pulled in. They opened fire.”
Velshi added, “There has been no provocation, Joshua. There was nothing that happened whatsoever. The police pulled into this intersection, unprovoked, right into the middle of the crowd, split the crowd, started firing in both directions. They now have fired at us.”
Velshi later stated, “We got hit, unfortunately, with tear gas, without our masks on. Because it was that fast. We have, by the way, had a good sense of when the tear gas is going to come. The police have generally been pretty orderly about it. But what happened here, there was no warning whatsoever. They literally pulled into the station, jumped out of their car, and they just came in and started shooting. We were very close. We weren’t, by the way, anywhere near the front of the crowd. We were maintaining security protocol. We were probably in the last third of the crowd. And they intercepted the crowd. They just broke the crowd, which put us very, very close to the police and they fired on us. There were flashbangs that came out. There were canisters that came out. And you saw, they actively aimed their guns at people.”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
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