It wasn’t Gerald Ford in 1975 in California or Ronald Reagan in Washington DC in 1982. The last time someone tried to kill the president of the United States was in 2005 in Georgia. Country, not the state.
I was in the crowd, reporting for the BBC at the time, as hundreds of thousands of people came out to greet George W. Bush in the main square of the capital Tbilisi. It must have felt refreshing to Bush, by then already hated by so much of the world for the disasters caused by the “war on terror”, to arrive in Georgia to a genuine hero’s welcome. Georgians embraced Bush, because they needed him to fight their own existential battle against constant, ongoing threats from Russia.
Tens of thousands turned up and stood for hours in the heat as they waited for George W Bush to come out into the main square to give public support to Georgia and send a message to Moscow that the country was not alone in the face of Russian aggression.
Among those in the square was 27 year old Vladimir Arutunian. According to this FBI report, which is full of rather brilliant detail, he “stood for hours in the hot sun, wearing a heavy leather coat and muttering and cursing to himself, part of a huge crowd waiting for President Bush to speak …He was clutching to his chest a hand grenade hidden in a red handkerchief. He was planning to kill the President.”
As soon as Bush started speaking, Arutunian “pulled the pin and hurled the grenade in the direction of the podium. It landed just 61 feet from where the President, First Lady Laura Bush, the President and First Lady of Georgia, and other officials sat”
Compared to the unforgettable scenes that unfolded in Pennsylvania, the assassination attempt against Bush was pretty anticlimactic. The grenade failed to detonate, no one on stage even realized it had been thrown, President Bush’s speech went uninterrupted, and afterwards, Arutunian went home to the apartment he shared with his mother in a sleepy Tbilisi suburb.
His miscalculation, FBI would explain later, was that he tied his red handkerchief a bit too tight around the grenade, preventing the firing pin from deploying fast enough.
It didn’t take long for the FBI and the Georgian security services to track down Arutunian. A few months later, Arutunian who was unemployed and spent most of his days experimenting with chemicals and explosives in his makeshift home laboratory, appeared in a small stuffy courtroom overflowing with reporters. He had already confessed to throwing the grenade and said he didn’t regret a thing because he hated the Georgian government for “being a puppet of the US.”
Vano Shlamov/AFP via Getty Images.
What I remember most vividly from the trial is Arutunian, thin with a black beard, pacing back and forth in his two by two meter metal cage in the corner of the courtroom. I counted his laps to keep myself awake in the airless room, as the judge began to read the verdict. A couple of my colleagues in the back tried to stay awake by chatting to each other, which got the rest of us in trouble. The judge forced everyone to stand up as he very slowly and very monotonously read the entire verdict. It took him four hours. I lost count of the laps, because Arutunian never stopped pacing.
I reported at the time that as he was led out of the courtroom, he was asked by one journalist if he considered himself a terrorist or an anti-globalist. “I don’t consider myself a terrorist, I’m just a human being,” he replied.
Today, the man who could have changed global history, is in the 20th year of his lifetime sentence. He spends his days making crafts: tiny soldiers and tanks and occasional portraits of Lenin, Stalin and Che Guevara, according to his mother who spoke to our reporter, Masho Lomashvili, the day after Trump’s assassination attempt.
Masho called the 83 year old Anjela Arutunian to ask whether she had spoken to her son and whether he had heard about the Trump assassination attempt. “Someone tried to kill Trump? I hadn’t heard, I have mostly been watching football,” said Angela Arutunian “Is he okay?” she asked.
Additional reporting by Masho Lomashvili.
The post Almost an assassin appeared first on Coda Story.
