Alex Salmond “died while opening a bottle of ketchup”, a horrified witnesses who was with him in Macedonia have said.
The former First Minister of Scotland died of a suspected heart attack last week aged 69 while attending a conference in the Baltic nation alongside other members of his Alba Party. The death triggered a political shockwave in the UK, with major figures – among them the Prime Minister and King – issuing public statements in his memory.
Details surrounding his death are yet to be fully confirmed, but witnesses who were with him at the time have come forward to offer their accounts of the moment he collapse. Mark Donfried, director of the Academy for Cultural Diplomacy, said attendees at the conference were eating lunch when they saw him collapse while trying to open a ketchup bottle.
Speaking to Times Radio, Mr Donfried said he arrived to eat lunch alongside Alba Party chair Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh, who asked him to help out with opening the ketchup. He explained: “Later on Tasmina told me she was having trouble opening the ketchup and she reached over and said, ‘Hey, can you give me a hand?’.”
Mr Donfried added that he “fell back in his chair” while helping her “without warning”. He continued: “And he was helping her with that when literally he fell back in his chair, totally out of the blue, without warning. Next to him was the former chief executive of the stock exchange of Cyprus and he basically took him in his arms.
“He was convinced – he told me later – that immediately he was unconscious. So we don’t think Alex actually suffered any pain, thank God. He felt his heart and he couldn’t feel the heart rate then.” The director added that paramedics attempted to resuscitate Mr Salmond for 30 minutes before pronouncing him dead.
He added: “Really time stopped. The entire hotel, the entire conference was in shock.” North Macedonia’s interior ministry confirmed that Mr Salmond died at around 3.30pm local time (2.30pm BST) and the Alba Party later confirmed in a note commemorating their dead leader that a post-mortem found he had died of a heart attack.