Alex Ritson

Let's get more now on how the drama unfolded.

Our Washington correspondent Bernd de Boosman was at the dinner.

I spoke to him minutes after the president was whisked away by security.

And you heard the noises, did you?

Yes, it is extraordinary watching the Secret Service in action in an event like this.

Bernd De Boosman, our chief North America correspondent, Gary O'Donoghue, was also in the room.

Well, I was about 40 feet from the stage where the President, Vice President, First Lady, RFK, PXF were all sitting, and the stage was to my left, and the doors into the ballroom were ahead of me, and that's where I heard the noise come from, and to me it sounded like that booming noise

that assault rifles make, but we haven't had confirmation.

What we have just had in the last minute or two is that the vice president and the president are uninjured.

When those noises happened, everyone around me in this huge ballroom where I am dived under the tables, and the Secret Service were on the stage taking the president and others straight out of the room.

I mean, astonishing speed on which they were all evacuated straight out of the rooms.

We'd only just had the first course and we'd had the national anthem.

We'd had the first speech and people just getting to tuck into their food.

And then these huge kind of noises from front and centre ahead of me.

And then we were all on the deck for, I don't know, about 20, 25 minutes after that.

They've locked the main doors, the ballroom.

I think we may try and find if there's a way out down the side here.

there's no the cell service is very patchy in here so i'm hoping you can hear me reasonably clearly but there must be 2 000 people in this room it's a huge forum and to give you an idea when i was on table 95 i'll give you an idea of the sort of scale of this event and the first time of course the president had come to the white house correspondence dinner he'd shunned it in years before um as president and he came tonight and um

I mean, our goodness knows, we'll find out what the actual details are, but the ramifications of this could be huge as well.

Gary O'Donoghue.