United States Democratic presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton vowed on Friday there would be no change to her campaign, despite a man taking several people hostage at one of her offices.
”I don’t see any changes in my campaign or my schedule,” Clinton told reporters in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, near the town of Rochester, where Friday’s stand-off occurred, adding ”I don’t see any way this will affect me.”
Clinton earlier met the hostages, their families and police teams who helped resolve the situation, and thanked law-enforcement officers for their work.
”This was obviously a very difficult situation,” she said, adding that the hostages had expressed ”a lot of relief, a lot of gratitude.”
”For me and my campaign it was a very tough and difficult day.”
The hostage-taker, identified as Lee Eisenberg, walked into one of Clinton’s campaign offices earlier on Friday saying he was armed with a bomb and held five people hostage before surrendering to police five hours later.
”It appears he needed help and sought attention in the wrong way,” Clinton said of the hostage-taker, who was said to have a history of mental illness.
Clinton, who was due to go on to Iowa on the next stage of her campaign trail, paid tribute to the volunteers held hostage at the campaign office.
”I’m very proud of them. They showed extraordinary courage, they were calm and collected under extreme pressure,” she said. ”These incidents unfortunately occur from time to time,” she added.
The incident came as campaigning for the 2008 White House race began heating up towards the first nominating contests in Iowa, just five weeks away on January 3, followed by the first primaries in New Hampshire on January 8.
Clinton, who was first lady during her husband Bill Clinton’s tenure in the White House from 1993 to 2001, is riding high in the polls.
And despite polls showing the race narrowing in key states ahead of the Iowa caucuses, she still leads nationwide in almost every significant opinion survey of the Democratic field. — AFP
