Eyewitness:"He was ranting and raving. He pulled a black box out of his bag. I thought it was a camera, but it was smoking and sparks and flames were coming out of it." One witness gave The Irish Times his account as loyalist killer of three Michael Stone attacked Stormont.
"He threw it towards the security people and I heard one of them shouting, 'It's a bomb, it's a bomb.' The security people grabbed onto him at the revolving doors and he grabbed onto the door. He was shouting, 'You are all dirty bastards.' A security man had him by one hand and a security woman held him by the other hand. She was also holding a gun that, I think, she snatched from him."
Camera crews and photographers in the Great Hall scrambled to catch Stone's gun and bomb bid but were herded back by Assembly staff towards the relative safety of the now-disused Senate chamber.
Just outside, Stone lay pinned to the ground with security staff holding his limbs. The woman who had wrested the gun from his hands just seconds earlier appeared to be trying to talk to him.
Within minutes the PSNI helicopter appeared overhead while more and more police officers arrived to move us away from Parliament Buildings and down through driving rain towards the statue of Edward Carson.
More stories began to emerge from witnesses who had been inside - each account more difficult to believe than the other, but all essentially true. They said Stone had been apprehended at the entrance to the Great Hall while in possession of a gun, bombs and a knife before being bundled outside.
Why a man who suffered from arthritis and often walked with the aid of a stick would mount such an attack, with no obvious escape route, baffled everyone.
Many who were in the building at the time of the alert, including Assembly members and officials, stood amid the rain and confusion.
Most had neither coats nor umbrellas and asked permission to get back to their offices. But police officers simply began to tape off the steps to the building and it became clear that Assembly proceedings, and everything else, were over for the day.