US President Donald Trump said the US Secret Service is investigating what he called "sabotage" at the UN, claiming that an escalator malfunction, a broken teleprompter and sound problems disrupted his appearance at the world body a day earlier.
Trump wrote in a post on "Truth Social" that the escalator he and his wife Melania were riding stopped and they almost fell. He called for the arrest of those responsible for the incident. He also said that his teleprompter went out at the beginning of his speech and that world leaders in the room could not hear him because the sound system failed.
"Not one, not two, but three very sinister events", Trump wrote. Trump said that he had asked the UN to preserve the security camera recordings and had requested an investigation. He announced that the Secret Service was investigating the case.
The escalator at the UN headquarters, which stopped just as US President Donald Trump and his wife Melania were boarding it, became the subject of a curious scene, documented by journalists' cameras and circulated on the Internet.
Trump recalled the escalator incident in his speech to the UN General Assembly, as he said that this was all he had received from the world organization - an escalator that stopped in the middle. "If the first lady wasn't in great shape, she would have fallen," Trump said.
But the UN said a member of Trump's delegation accidentally pressed the button to stop the escalator. "The safety mechanism on the escalator was inadvertently activated by someone who was there before the president," Stephane Dujarric, a spokesman for UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, told AFP. The escalator was then restarted.