Rowdy scenes erupted today after the European Parliament refused a hard-right request for a minute of silence to honour slain US activist and Donald Trump ally Charlie Kirk.
Lawmakers on the European hard right, which maintains close ties to Trump’s White House, wanted the EU parliament, like the US Congress, to observe a silent tribute to the 31-year-old.
Video footage from Strasbourg, France, showed right-wing politicians shushing those speaking over the silence, before banging their desks and shouting ‘shut up’ and ‘be quiet’.
‘Our right to freedom of speech cannot be extinguished,’ Charlie Weimers of the Sweden Democrats wrote to Speaker Roberta Metsola in requesting the gesture.
But when Weimers tried to observe the tribute by yielding his speaking time on the floor, he was cut short by the session chair, who reminded him the request had been denied for procedural reasons.
Weimers accused the European Parliament of ‘bias’.
He pointed to the contrast with the tribute observed in 2020 for George Floyd, whose murder by a US police officer triggered global protests.
Italy’s hard-right Northern League likewise attacked parliament’s decision as ‘politically shameful and morally unacceptable’.
Video footage from Strasbourg, France , showed right-wing politicians shushing those speaking over the silence, before banging their desks and shouting ‘shut up’ and ‘be quiet’
Rowdy scenes erupted today after the European Parliament refused a hard-wing request for a minute of silence to honour slain US activist and President Donald Trump ally Charlie Kirk
‘Charlie Kirk didn’t deserve to die,’ the centrist French lawmaker Nathalie Loiseau posted on X in response.
‘Whether he deserves to be honoured by our parliament is a another story,’ she said, linking to past social media posts by Kirk assailing Ukraine’s leader Volodymyr Zelensky.
Questioned on the incident, the European Commission said only that it ‘condemns all forms of violence, and we offer our sincere sympathies to the families of the victims’.
The sniper who assassinated Charlie Kirk is believed to have jumped off the roof and fled after firing a single shot from a high-powered rifle which police recovered from woodland close to Utah Valley University.
The killer is believed to have blended in on the campus where Mr Kirk was shot and appeared to be of ‘college age’, police said as they continued to investigate the latest act of political violence in America.
It remained unclear how far the killer has travelled though law enforcement officials said nearby woods where the rifle was found have been secured.
Federal, state and local authorities said they were working on ‘multiple active crime scenes’ on Thursday in the search for the killer of the conservative activist and close ally of President Donald Trump.
‘This is a dark day for our state. It’s a tragic day for our nation,’ said Utah Governor Spencer Cox.
‘I want to be very clear, this is a political assassination.’
Mr Trump announced on Thursday he will posthumously award Mr Kirk the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
This article was originally published by a www.dailymail.co.uk . Read the Original article here. .