Establishments closed earlier than usual on Saturday evening at Dadeland Shopping Center, where there was great uproar and panic after alleged gunfire and the arrest of suspected thieves.
Anxious visitors searched for the nearest exit. And police patrols protected all entrances to the mall in an uproar where no one understood what was going on.
Adriana Correa, a witness to the incident at Dadeland Shopping Centre, said: ‘I heard three gunshots and saw people running towards the door.
Correa, who was waiting for her sister when the chaos began, says after hearing the alleged gunshots, they locked themselves in a restaurant.
“There was a lot of commotion inside, people were shouting: what’s up, what’s up?”, says Correa, who says she is sure that “something happened, I was there and I have seen it all”.
In a video shared on social media, the panic is evident in the food court, where desperate people ran in the company of children and the elderly.
In the crush, there were those who failed to take their belongings, such as a pram left in the middle of the hall.
Minutes later, after authorities arrived, another video shows two officers handcuffing one of the suspects.
As confirmed by the authorities, the disturbance to public order on Saturday night at the Dadeland Mall was due to a robbery in one of the commercial establishments and not a shooting as suggested by some witnesses of the facts.
For this incident, three people have been captured, while the investigation progresses and new details of the incident which flooded a busy shopping center in the city with panic are known.