"So I figured, ‘This is it. This is the moment'."
A couple decided to get married after becoming stranded at the summit of the Eiffel Tower.
Amir Khan and Kat Warren, of Washington DC, USA, thought their trip to the Paris landmark on October 19, 2023, would be uneventful.
But a man claimed the tower, forcing its lifts to shut down and dozens of visitors to be temporarily stranded at the summit.
Faced with the unexpected delay in their travel plans, Amir decided to make the most of their wait and got down on one knee.
He asked Kat to marry him and she said yes.
Among the stranded tourists was a reporter from the Associated Press who captured the couple’s story.
Amir said: “I figured we might be here longer than I imagined.”
Amir had been planning to propose later that evening in a Paris garden away from the crowds, with a romantic dinner on the River Seine.
He continued: “So I didn’t want to miss dinner and she always wanted to be proposed to on or under the Eiffel Tower.
“So I figured, ‘This is it. This is the moment’.”
Kat explained that her fiance “had a pretty good chance of me saying ‘yes’ all along” and that her decision was not influenced by the fact that she was trapped over 1,000 feet in the air with Amir at the time of his proposal.
She joked that if she said no, “somebody else would be climbing the Eiffel Tower today possibly”.
Alice Beunardeau, communications director for the Eiffel Tower, the man who was climbing the tower was arrested.
He was discovered between the second and third floors.
A specialist team of climbing firefighters led the man down and police arrested him.
Ms Beunardeau said the unidentified man reportedly had a banner reading “Free Billie Eilish”.
She added:
“I’m not certain of that at this moment, but on the face of it, that was the message.”
First opened in 1889, the Eiffel Tower is visited by about seven million people each year.
The tower was built in just over two years.
The tower’s top viewing point is 1,083 feet in the air.
Tourists can either take the stairs or an elevator from the ground to the Eiffel Tower’s second floor, where they then have to board a separate elevator to reach the third floor.
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