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People Run for Cover as Gunfire at Seattle Festival Kills Three; Crews Battle Raging Wildfires in France and Spain; U.S. Signals Pause in Iran Strikes Amid Concerns Over Weapons Stockpile. Aired 7- 7:30a ET

Aired July 27, 2026 - 07:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

[07:00:00]

KATE BOLDUAN, CNN ANCHOR: Breaking overnight, a manhunt underway after a deadly shooting in the middle of a packed food festival in Seattle. Three people are dead, several more injured, including a child. We're live on the scene.

SARA SIDNER, CNN ANCHOR: Breaking overseas, a multi-nation fight against wildfires, France ordering the largest evacuation since World War II. Its wine region threatened. Spain battling its largest wildfire in recent history, its capital under threat, and conditions only expected to get worse.

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: All right, look out below. Super strong winds tear the scaffolding off of a high-rise building. What happened to the people on the ground?

I'm John Berman with Kate Bolduan and Sara Sidner. This is CNN News Central.

BOLDUAN: All right, let's get to the breaking news this morning, a deadly mass shooting in Seattle near the iconic Space Needle. Gunfire was heard erupting at a popular summertime food festival that attracts thousands of families. It's a beloved event in that city. People seen running for cover and their lives.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Machine guns went off.

I saw. Oh my God.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Come, Becky.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We got to get the heck out of here.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BOLDUAN: Investigators now say that three people are dead, four others are injured, including a two-year-old child, and there is audio now of first responders in the middle of it all.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Anyone have a small, a child tourniquet size?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Someone has a tourniquet?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: For a small child.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Small child arm tourniquet.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BOLDUAN: Some of the terrified festival-goers even seen taking cover it seems, and trying to hide out in the gift shop of the Space Needle while this is happening. Witnesses also then describe what happened, what they experienced.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I saw families, kids, everyone just like running out of the fair. And he had told me, like just run. Just run. Active shooter, someone was yelling, active shooter. I jumped the fence quickly and I ran. I just kept running.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BOLDUAN: So, police, they now believe that two people were shooting at each other. Innocent people enjoying the festival caught in the middle of it.

CNN's Julia Vargas Jones is live this morning at the scene in Seattle. A lot of questions still of what really was happening there and who they are now searching for. What's the latest you're picking up, Julia?

JULIA VARGAS JONES, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, Kate, it, they're still trying to piece together those very chaotic moments that turned this festival into that scene of violence. Behind me here, you can see some of the stalls. People are just allowed just now, moments before we came on air, to come into start cleaning up because, as of now, it's like the scene was frozen in time.

You know, the shooting was yesterday at 6:00 P.M., and it's been untouched since. That's when people first heard those pop, pop, pop that some said to some of our affiliates that they thought were fireworks at first. And I think we have some new video that shows those very first moments, Kate, that I want to play for our viewers, where you see people running and taking cover wherever they can to try to avoid it as they're starting to realize that there's something deeply wrong here.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: So I want to make sure you guys subscribe. Help me get to 100,000. I'm like 2,000 subscribers away. That is literally one spiral video and 200,000. I'll get that plaque that says 100,000.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Shooting. Shooting. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Shooting? Oh, shit. Oh, shit, right here.

Get down. Get down. Get down. Yes, just get down.

Oh, it's right there. Oh -- get -- no, get the register. Yes, get the register and the tips, and the tips.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

JONES: And it goes to show, Kate, just how confusing that situation was. Police say now that those two people were shooting at each other. They have one person in custody, still looking for that second one. What we are hearing now from authorities is that we can expect today possibly an initial appearance for that person who is in custody, that isn't quite a charging hearing at this time.

[07:05:08]

This will be just initial information presented to a judge, and authorities still have about 72 hours to decide how they will charge this first person and continue with that manhunt. Kate?

BOLDUAN: Right. And three people dead. Is there an update on what we know about the others injured, including that child?

JONES: Yes, we did have an update overnight. Basically, we had initial reports of two people that were dead from this incident. And overnight, a third person who had been taken to hospital as part of those injured with a wound from a bullet. That person also passed away, Kate, adding to that death toll that we're seeing there.

So, now three people dead, others injured, and that two-year-old child, just so heartbreaking to hear those first responders trying to find the right size tourniquet for that child, just the pain that family must be going through, heartbreaking.

BOLDUAN: Yes. Looking for an update on how those who are still in hospital are doing this morning as well.

Julia, thank you very much. Sara?

SIDNER: All right, thank you so much, Kate. Breaking overnight, extreme wildfires raging across France are so large they have created their own weather systems. Firefighters are racing to control the sprawling fires ripping across Southwest France and Central Spain that have destroyed entire towns.

The fires have led to France issuing its largest evacuation order since World War II. Nearly 220,000 people are now out of their homes. In Spain, more than 30,000 people have been evacuated across Madrid.

CNN's Melissa Bell is in one of the hardest hit areas of southwest France. Give us some sense of what's happening there, how people are responding to this. I mean, this is absolute devastation in some of these areas. MELISSA BELL, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: And on a scale that we really hadn't seen here in France with this kind of natural catastrophe, Sara. This is one of the main command and control centers here alongside the main Gironde fire because, of course, there are several wildfires currently raging in France, including one to the south of here. But this, the one, the Gironde fire, as it's become known, is by far the largest. And what is remarkable is its sheer scale, the area that it now covers.

So, here behind me at control centers like this dotted around the fire, you have this extraordinary coordination effort because you're not just looking at the 2,500 firefighters who are currently engaged in trying to tackle and contain this fire. It hasn't yet been contained five days in. But also the efforts of civilians who've been drafted in, anyone who had a tractor, local farmers, we watched them over the course of the weekend. Anyone who had a pickup truck with jerry cans mounted on them, hoses to try and take out the fire where they could.

Now, the conditions over the weekend had been very difficult. There was a lot of wind, and I think that's why you see this very erratic progression of the fire, Sara. When you look at a map of it, it kind of went eastwards. It went westwards, then it went eastwards, and overnight it's continued pushing towards those outer suburbs of Bordeaux. It's now about 15 kilometers from the city center itself.

That has meant over the course of the weekend, as you say, many more evacuations. 220,000 people now living in shelters or having sought refuge elsewhere, their homes abandoned. All around this area, it is ghost towns you're talking about. These are local towns that should be thriving with holidaymakers. They're entirely empty. The only people you'll see are the firefighters and the civilians very bravely out there, as they explained to us over the course of the weekend, to try and save their homes.

We've already heard that some 250 homes have been lost already, but I think we won't even begin to start counting the cost of this until this monstrous fire has been contained. And this is one of several. When you look at a map of Europe, what's striking this morning is how many wildfires are raging across the continent, Sara, as a result of these successive heat waves, the dry conditions on the ground.

Over in Spain, as you say, fires still raging alongside Madrid, but also in the east of the country. They've already proven deadly over the course of the weekend, and in Italy. These extraordinary pictures that have come from a coastal town in the northeast of the country where to get people from the safety of the flames, they actually evacuated them by water.

So, it is a continent right now that is feeling the effects of this exceptionally long, hot summer and, of course, climate change. Sara?

SIDNER: Absolutely, Melissa Bell. It is terrifying to think how large and how widespread these fires are across Europe. Thank you so much for your reporting there. We'll keep an eye on it and come back to you as soon as you have an update. John?

BERMAN: All right. Developing this morning, did the White House blink? U.S. military operations in Iran on hold over concerns about the shrinking stockpile of U.S. weapons.

A man suing OpenAI, claiming that ChatGPT gave him life-threatening health advice.

And as if the race is not grueling enough, a cyclist at the Tour de France nearly falls off a cliff during a crash.

[07:10:06]

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BERMAN: All right, breaking this morning, global oil prices falling sharply. Look at that. Brent crude was up over a hundred dollars a barrel at one point last week. Why is it dropping? The United States appears to have paused its bombing raids on Iran. New reporting suggests high level concerns in the administration about dwindling reserves of U.S. air defense munitions.

[07:15:06]

Let's get right to CNN's Kevin Liptak at the White House. Pretty interesting. What's the White House saying about this, Kevin?

KEVIN LIPTAK, CNN SENIOR WHITE HOUSE REPORTER: Yes, and we have ha- now had three days of relative calm after that 13-day stretch where we saw those night-by-night attacks. And it does come even after the president was threatening this major escalation in Iran.

There was a discussion at the White House on Friday discussing both the efficacy of those night-by-night strikes, but also about the potential risks for escalation. And what we're told is that both the vice president, J.D. Vance, and General Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, raised concerns about escalation, and that Caine in particular has warned about the potential for dwindling stockpiles of U.S. munitions, including air defense interceptors.

Now, the administration strongly denies that that is an issue. What Mike Waltz, the American ambassador to the United Nations, said yesterday is that, quote, the military has everything it needs to conduct this campaign as effectively as it needs to be, and also claiming somewhat contradictory there, that anyone leaking information about weapons stockpiles deserves to be in jail.

Now, there were a few other concerns that were raised in this meeting, including the potential for a wider regional retaliation. The president also hearing concerns about the potential for civilian deaths inside of Iran if he went after some of those civilian infrastructure sites that he'd been repeatedly warning he would attack, including bridges, power plants that sort of thing.

Now, what the administration is also saying today is that they want space for the diplomacy to proceed, and I am told this morning that that is still continuing. You know, mediators, including Pakistan and Qatar, still in discussions to try and get the two sides back to the negotiating table. You also have Iran and Oman discussing ways to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

What you've seen President Trump doing over the weekend is continuing this relatively belligerent approach on social media. He posted almost a dozen A.I.-generated images of the U.S. seizing oil tankers, of the U.S. striking Kharg Island, including oil sites on that very critical export site.

Now, the president still continuing to have these diplomatic discussions. He's also expected to discuss the whole situation with the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. He's visiting the U.S. for Lindsey Graham's funeral tomorrow. Israel has made pretty clear that it thinks the U.S. has unfinished business inside of Iran.

BERMAN: It's really interesting. It may leave the impression to some that Iran is staring down the United States, at least in this phase, in this latest two-week phase of the operation there.

Kevin Liptak at the White House, thank you very much. Kate?

BOLDUAN: Coming up for us, a terror attack at a crowded Pride festival in Berlin. What we're learning now about the suspect that police say drove into the crowd and then began attacking people with a machete. We've got more on this.

And police are now searching for two men caught on video parachuting from -- parachuting more than 600 feet from the top of the Space Needle.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[07:20:00]

BOLDUAN: Today, Germany's chancellor is vowing that the country will remain united even following a deadly attack at a pride celebration in Berlin. Now, authorities say the attacker drove a van into a crowd and then started attacking people with a machete this weekend. One person was killed, 29 other people were wounded.

CNN's Fred Pleitgen is in Berlin with the very latest. What more are you learning about this whole thing?

FREDERIK PLEITGEN, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Hi there, Kate. Well, actually we're right on the path where all of this happened. And one of the things we need to point out to our viewers, first of all, is that this is a park path. This is not a public road. So, somehow the car managed to get into this public park here in Berlin, the Tiergarten in Central Berlin.

You can see that at this tree here, for instance some flowers have been laid down. It's unclear whether or not this is one of the places where someone got hit by that van. But the way you have to imagine it is that there were barriers all around here, so the police are trying to find out how exactly this van managed to get into this area. But it would've been going around here at a very high pace, hitting people along the way, along this path.

And then if we zoom that way a little bit, there's a tree back there where the van hit the tree, and that's apparently where the people who were inside the van, the driver and whoever else was in the van, got out and started stabbing people along the way.

So, there's still some questions that the authorities are asking. One of them is whether or not the alleged perpetrator who was shot yesterday night by police officers, whether he acted alone, whether or not there were other people still inside that van as well who may have acted with him. And then, of course, exactly how exactly this could have happened.

Abdul B., who's the person that the police have named as a suspect, he was shot and killed last night when the police found him on the western outskirts of Berlin. He was actually known, the police say, to be in what they call Islamist circles here in this city, and there are some who are questioning why he hadn't been in custody at the time that all of this happened.

But -- and, again, the security concept here for this pride parade is definitely something that's being questioned. But, of course, as you can imagine, this is all still very fresh for the city, for the people of the city right now. There is a lot of sorrow. There's a lot of people who just down that path over there are laying flowers for the victims.

29 people were injured, some of them with life-threatening injuries, and again, one person killed.

[07:25:00]

Kate?

BOLDUAN: Yes, and still so much to understand as you lay out how they were able to pull it off, motivations for it, and all.

Thank you so much, Fred. I really appreciate it. Terrifying. Sara?

SIDNER: All right. Thank you, Kate.

Breaking news, we're getting new details after three people were killed, multiple others injured in a shooting at a Seattle festival. New video showing what happens moments after shots rang out.

And some terrifying video as powerful winds rip a multi-storey scaffolding off a high-rise skyscraper. The reason for all that and where it is, next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[07:30:00]