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Authorities in California arrested an individual over the weekend in connection with a violent attack on a wheelchair user during a rally in support of President Donald Trump.
The California Highway Patrol (CHP) said officers made the arrest following the incident outside the state capitol building in Sacramento on Saturday, local news channel CBS13 reported.
It came amid reports of verbal and physical clashes at the site between pro-Trump protesters and counter-protesters.
Police said the counter-protester hit the person in the wheelchair in the face with a chain. The suspect, who has not been named, was subsequently taken into custody and reportedly faces charges of assault with a deadly weapon and elder abuse.
Newsweek has approached CHP for comment.
In a separate incident at the rally, at least one person was witnessed deploying pepper spray into crowds of people shortly before 2 p.m. The spray reportedly affected CHP officers and Sacramento police present at the scene.
Counter-protesters told local newspaper The Sacramento Bee that pro-Trump protesters had deployed the pepper spray.
"They were screaming and yelling and they just started roaring out of nowhere, and then suddenly they pulled out these huge cans of mace and sprayed it over the entire crowd," a witness told the newspaper.
"Even as we were backing away and trying to grab each other they just kept spraying before the police came over and shooed them away."
Hundreds of pro-Trump supporters turned out for the rally, according to local media reports, chanting "four more years, four more years" in a show of backing for the president's unsubstantiated claims he won the recent November 3 election.
Trump has alleged the ballot was marred by widespread fraud and is yet to concede to Democratic President-elect Joe Biden, who is projected to take 306 electoral college votes to Trump's 232 and is more than five million popular votes clear of the Republican incumbent's 73.1 million votes.
Instead, Trump's election campaign has filed lawsuits challenging the vote counts in a number of states. Several cases have already been thrown out by judges.
The president's campaign has not launched any lawsuit challenging the vote count in California, however. Trump scooped just 34.1 percent of the popular vote in the state, which has been a Democratic stronghold in recent decades.
Biden's campaign has meanwhile moved to call for the federal government to sign off on an official transition of power so that the President-elect's team can receive national security briefings and address the ongoing coronavirus pandemic ahead of his inauguration on January 20.
"What we really want to see this week ... is the General Services Administration issue that ascertainment," Ron Klain, Biden's incoming chief of staff, told NBC News' "Meet the Press" on Sunday.
But GSA Administrator Emily Murphy, who was appointed to her position by Trump in 2017, has not yet determined that "a winner is clear," Reuters news agency quoted a spokeswoman as saying last week.
Murphy's stance has effectively delayed the Biden team's access to millions of dollars in federal funding and the ability to meet with officials at intelligence agencies and other departments.
