A knife-wielding assailant on Sunday stabbed the mayor of the Polish port city of Gdansk in front of hundreds of people at a charity event, leaving the politician fighting for his life after five hours of surgery yesterday.
Video footage showed the attacker bursting onto the podium and launching himself at Pawel Adamowicz, 53, who had been waving sparklers with others on stage at the evening fundraiser.
After knifing the mayor several times, the man turned to the crowd with his arms raised triumphantly before being tackled to the ground by security guards and arrested.
Paramedics resuscitated Adamowicz at the scene before rushing him to a hospital, where doctors said that he had survived an operation, but was in a “very, very critical condition.”
The mayor sustained a serious wound to the heart, and cuts to the diaphragm and abdominal organs, said Tomasz Stefaniak, the surgeon who treated him at Gdansk’s university hospital.
A local police spokesman said the detained man was a 27-year-old who lived in Gdansk, a Baltic coast city with a population of about 500,000.
In a video recording of the attack posted on YouTube, the suspect was seen seizing the microphone and claiming he had been wrongly jailed by the previous government of the Civic Platform and tortured.
“That’s why Adamowicz dies,” he said.
One eyewitness told broadcaster TVN that the man appeared “happy with what he had done.”
Adamowicz has been mayor of Gdansk for two decades and the Civic Platform supported his re-election last year.
“There is hope, but his condition remains serious,” Polish President Andrzej Duda said on Twitter, adding that Adamowicz was alive, but “gravely wounded.”
“Despite our political differences, I stand without question in solidarity with him and those close to him... I pray for his swift recovery,” Duda said.
According to local media, the suspect had been sentenced to more than five years in prison for four armed attacks on banks in Gdansk.
Police were investigating how the attacker had been able to breach security to reach the podium, local police spokeswoman Joanna Kowalik-Kosinska told reporters.
“We know that he used an identifier with the inscription ‘Press,’” she said. “Now we have to establish how was it obtained, was the accreditation in his name and was he really entitled to be there at that time?”
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