Two people are dead after a drunk driver crashed through barricades set up for the South by Southwest (SXSW) festival in Austin, Texas police says.
A man and a woman died and many others were injured on the crowded street in Austin.
The driver is thought to have been trying to escape from the police when the collision happened.
Austin Police Chief Art Acevedo said he had now been taken into custody after officers shocked him with a stun gun.
The driver will face two counts of capital murder over the crash, which took place about 12.30 a.m. local time on Thursday.
Art Acevedo confirmed the two people who died had been on a moped. Further details about the pair have yet to be released.
Many of the 23 who have been hurt were thought to have been leaving a club where a concert had been held. Five of the injured are said to be in a critical condition.
Two people are dead after a drunk driver crashed through barricades set up for the SXSW festival in Austin
The police chief said the man also hit a cab before jumping out of his car and trying to escape on foot.
Images of ambulances and fire engines and people being treating at the scene were shared on social media.
Police confirmed the news on Twitter and also appealed for people who had been in the area at the time to come forward.
“If you witnessed the incident that took place at 9th and Red River please make sure you talk with an officer on the scene. #SXSW,” they wrote.
The collision happened outside of the Mohawk venue. According to its website, Tyler the Creator was due to perform at the venue in the early hours of Thursday morning.
Tyler the Creator tweeted: “Show Isn’t Happening, Something Sad Happened. I’m Bummed.”
The venue also posted a message on the social media site, confirming the shows and events had been cancelled.
“Our thoughts and prayers are with the families of the victims from tonight’s tragedy. Make sure everyone you know is home safe tonight,” they added.
SXSW, which runs from March 11 to March 16, is known as one of the world’s best platforms for rising talent.
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Edward Snowden spoke before a packed auditorium of technology innovators via video link in Austin at the South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive conference on Monday.
Global mass surveillance conducted by the US and other governments is “setting fire to the future of the internet”, he said.
He added: “You guys are all the firefighters, and we need you to help us fix this.”
The former NSA contractor, who fled the US last year after leaking thousands of documents that revealed his employer’s extensive surveillance programs, spoke to the audience through a choppy Google Hangout video connection running through multiple proxy servers to conceal his location.
Although Edward Snowden has granted a handful interviews to the media since his revelations made global headlines and led to his seeking asylum in Russia, it was one of his first live appearances before a general audience.
During his one-hour session moderated by his lawyer, Ben Wizner of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Edward Snowden urged internet and computing experts to design and produce encrypted communication technology that the average user can use.
Often delving into the technical details of internet security, calling it “defense against the dark arts in the digital realm”, he said the systems currently available, if used by the general public, would make NSA bulk surveillance programs much more difficult.
Edward Snowden also denounced what he saw as a change in US priorities since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, focusing on breaking communication security rather than protecting information.
Edward Snowden spoke via video link at the SXSW Interactive conference in Austin
“When you are the one country in the world that is sort of a vault that is more full than anyone else, it doesn’t make sense for you to be attacking all day rather and never defend your vault,” he said.
He also criticized the NSA’s mass data collection system as being ineffective and a waste of resources. Instead, he said, the agency should be focusing on the type of people who present a threat.
Edward Snowden cited Boston Marathon bombing suspects Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and his brother Tamerlan as individuals the government might have been able to catch if they had directed resources in the right areas.
“We spent all this money, we spent all this time hacking into Google’s and Facebook’s back end to look at their databases,” he said.
“What did we get out of that? We got nothing.”
Edward Snowden received a warm reception from the audience, and the question-and-answer session included words of praise in an email from internet pioneer Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who said his actions were “profoundly in the public interest”.
His appearance was not without critics, however. Congressman Mike Pompeo of Kansas wrote an open letter to the conference’s organizers on Friday, urging them to deny the NSA leaker a public platform to air his views.
Edward Snowden’s “only apparent qualification”, he writes, “is his willingness to steal from his own government and then flee to that beacon of first amendment freedoms, the Russia of Vladimir Putin”.
At the start of the session, Ben Wizner, who serves as Edward Snowden’s legal advisor, replied that although freedom of expression protections are generally stronger in the US than in Russia, “if there’s one person for whom that’s not true, it’s Ed Snowden”.
If Edward Snowden were still in the US, he said, he’d probably be held by the government in solitary confinement.
Edward Snowden’s session is the latest event in a technology conference that has been dominated by talk of internet security, government surveillance and privacy rights.
In his final question, Edward Snowden was asked to assess the importance of his revelations.
“Regardless of what happens to me, this is something we had a right to know,” he said.
“I took an oath to support and defend the constitution, and I saw the constitution was violated on a massive scale.”
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