El Paso shooting 'hero' detained at White House as police cast doubt on his account of facing down gunman

Chris Grant was hailed after claiming he distracted attacker by throwing soda bottles at him - but police say it didn't happen

Chris Grant tells CNN he distracted El Paso mass shooter attacker by thowing bottles at him (Screengrab / CNN)

A survivor of the El Paso supermarket mass shooting who was hailed a hero after claiming he distracted the gunman so others could escape has been arrested by US Secret Service agents while attending a White House ceremony.

Chris Grant was detained because of an unspecified outstanding criminal warrant.

But it came as doubts also begun to be cast on his version of events surrounding the massacre in early August, in which 22 people were killed.

The 50-year-old – who was himself severely wounded during the attack – repeatedly told news outlets that he had thrown soda bottles at alleged gunman Patrick Crusius.

“And I'm not a baseball player,” he told one interview with CNN. “So one went this way, one went that way. And then one went right towards him and then that's when he saw me.”

A GoFundMe page later raised nearly $17,000 [£13,800] on the Texan's behalf, before he was invited to the Washington DC on Monday – along with other heroes and first responders – by Donald Trump.

But El Paso Police Department has now said his claims are inconsistent with CCTV footage from the massacre on 3 August.

"Nobody [from the White House] bothered to check with us," Sergeant Enrique Carrillo told the Washington Examiner. "They would have been informed, as I am telling you now, that our detectives reviewed hours of video and his actions did not match his account."

Sergeant Carrillo said that Mr Grant had not done anything wrong during the attack – but emphasised that he simply had not tried to distract the shooter as he claimed.

“His actions were captured by surveillance cameras and they are not as described by Mr Grant,” he said. “We are not demeaning his reaction which are of basic human instincts but they amount to an act of self-preservation and nothing above that.”

Another officer, Sergeant Robert Gomez, told KVIA-TV: “We’ve never had anything like this happen, never had a victim’s report so skewed from what actually happened.”

It remains unclear why Mr Grant was arrested moments before the White House ceremony but he is understood to have a long criminal record – including having spent time in prison for theft and shop lifting – and was said by the Secret Service to be a “fugitive of justice”.

A spokesman added: “It was subsequently determined that, while the arrest warrant was still active, the agency that issued the warrant would not extradite, at which time the individual was released from custody.”

In the confusion, Mr Grant was still honoured with a Heroic Commendation by Mr Trump but the signed certificate was passed to his mother, Minnie Grant, 82, in his absence.