A 37-year-old man is in critical condition after being stabbed in the neck with a broken beer bottle at a concert hosted by BlackBerry maker Research In Motion in London Tuesday night. The party was being held to celebrate RIM's BlackBerry Messenger tool, according to the Wall Street Journal blog.
The stabbing occurred after a performance by British pop singer Jessie J at the Pulse club in London, according to the online music magazine NME.
Britain's Channel 4 technology correspondent Benjamin Cohen, who was in attendance, told NME that "A lot of people [at the event] were teen users of BlackBerry who don't seem to have had a free drink before."
"It is atrocious for BlackBerry," he added.
Cohen blogged about the incident Wednesday, describing a boozy scene and observing that the crowd was "frankly very rowdy" and that BlackBerry devices that had been attached to tables at the event so that guests could order drinks remotely had "apparently been stolen" prior to the incident.
A tweet from RIM's U.K. division late Tuesday expressed immediate concern for the injured guest.
A Scotland Yard spokesman told the BBC that a 25-year-old man had been arrested in connection with the stabbing. Meanwhile, the victim is being treated in an east London hospital.
The stabbing is the latest in a string of unfortunate news for the Canadian company, whose market share has declined in the last three years.
In November, two drunk RIM employees forced a jet to turn around halfway to China after they began acting recklessly. In December, a stampede at a promotional event in Indonesia hospitalized several people, according to the Wall Street Journal blog.
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