(Luis Cornelio, Headline USA) Disturbing footage captured the exact moment when a reported African man robbed, assaulted and threatened to kill a Spanish reporter while on live air.
The harrowing ordeal began as Marta Manzano, a reporter for local channel Antena 3 (Chanel 3), prepared to go on air for the show Espejo Público (Public Mirror) as she regularly does.
It was then that a man, described by El Debate newspaper as “subsahariano” (sub-Saharan, in English), started to pester the reporter and her camera crew. He then proceeded to dig through the crew’s luggage.
“What are you doing!?” Manzano can be heard shouting at the man in Spanish.
“Call the police! Call the police,” she pleaded with bystanders, before directing the camera towards the man. “Come here… I got you on camera. You’re live on air.”
As recounted by the reporter herself in a subsequent Spanish interview.
“He continuously demanded we take our wallets out. He asked to see our press passes, but we told him we didn’t have them because only law enforcement can view those,” she declared.
The man grew angrier when the reporter did not concede to his demands. “That’s when he started touching the camera. He pushed my colleague, and that’s when I began pleading for help,” she declared.
The man started rummaging through the camera equipment, she said. “I approached and asked myself, ‘What am I doing?’ because I didn’t know what he might do next.”
The video captured the man uttering some inaudible foreign words, with local media reporting that he said, “Call the police and I will kill you.”
Despite repeated pleas for help, Manzano said nobody came to their aid. “There were multiple witnesses, but nobody did anything,” she lamented.
Manzano shared news of the assault on her Instagram’s temporary stories, with several of her colleagues applauding her bravery during the horrific incident.
