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Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has said his “heart goes out” to the family of Philando Castile, the black man shot dead by police in Minnesota during a traffic stop.
In the immediate aftermath of the incident, Castile’s fiancee Diamond Reynolds grabbed her phone and began broadcasting the ordeal using Facebook Live, showing Castile slipping in and out of consciousness while covered in blood, and an armed police officer still aiming his weapon through the driver’s window of their car.
The 10-minute video, which also shows Reynolds’s four-year-old daughter witnessing the shooting, has been watched five million times on Facebook and sparked immediate protests across the US.
Mark Zuckerberg – Yesterday, a Minnesota woman named… | Facebook
Zuckerberg posted on his own page on Thursday night that he hoped “we never have to see another video like Diamond’s”, but added that a more open and connected world was important to shine a light on different issues.
“My thoughts are also with all members of the Facebook community who are deeply troubled by these events,” he wrote.
“The images we’ve seen this week are graphic and heartbreaking, and they shine a light on the fear that millions of members of our community live with every day.”
Further violence has since erupted in Dallas, where five police officers have been killed and several more injured by sniper fire during a Black Lives Matter protest in the wake of Castile’s death, and that of Alton Sterling in Louisiana just 24 hours earlier.
