The wife of the shooter who killed 49 people at a gay nightclub in Orlando knew of his plans for the attack and could soon be charged in connection with the deadliest mass shooting in modern US history, a law enforcement source said on Tuesday.
The source told reporters that a federal grand jury has been convened and would charge Omar Mateen’s wife, Noor Salman, as early as yesterday.
“It appears she had some knowledge of what was going on,” said US Senator Angus King, a member of the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which received a briefing on the attack on Tuesday.
Photo: AFP
“She definitely is, I guess you would say, a person of interest right now. She appears to be cooperating and can provide us with some important information,” King told CNN.
Mateen, who was shot dead by police after a three-hour standoff at the Pulse nightclub early on Sunday, called 911 during his shooting spree to profess allegiances to various militant Muslim groups.
Federal investigators have said he was likely self-radicalized and there was no evidence that he received any instructions or aid from outside organizations such as the Islamic State group.
Mateen, 29, was a US citizen, born in New York of Afghan immigrant parents.
“He appears to have been an angry, disturbed, unstable young man who became radicalized,” US President Barack Obama told reporters.
Mateen, who was a security guard, was systematic during his rampage, working his way through the packed club shooting people who were already down.
He apparently wanted to ensure they were dead, said Angel Colon, a wounded survivor.
“I look over and he shoots the girl next to me and I was just there laying [sic] down and thinking: ‘I am next, I am dead,’” Colon said.
Mateen shot him twice more, one bullet apparently aimed for Colon’s head striking his hand, and another hitting his hip, Colon said at Orlando Regional Medical Center, where he is one of 27 survivors being treated.
FoxNews.com — citing an FBI source — said prosecutors were seeking to charge Mateen’s wife as an accessory to 49 counts of murder and 53 counts of attempted murder, failure to notify law enforcement about the pending attack and lying to federal agents.
NBC News said Salman told federal agents she tried to talk her husband out of carrying out the attack.
However, she also told the FBI she once drove him to the Pulse nightclub because he wanted to scope it out, the network said.
Salman’s mother, Ekbal Zahi Salman, lives in a middle-class neighborhood of the suburban town of Rodeo, California.
A neighbor said Noor Salman only visited her mother once after she married Mateen.
Noor Salman’s mother “did not like him very much. He did not allow her [Noor] to come here,” neighbor Rajinder Chahal said.
Chahal said he had spoken to Noor Salman’s mother after the Orlando attack, and that “she was crying, weeping.”
Obama denounced presumptive Republican US presidential candidate Donald Trump for his proposed ban on Muslims entering the US, joining presumptive Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton in portraying Trump as unfit for the White House.
Since the shooting, Trump has criticized Obama for not using the term “radical Islamic terrorism” to describe violent Muslim militants.
“What exactly would using this label accomplish, what exactly would it change?” Obama said. “Someone seriously thinks we do not know who we are fighting? ... There is no magic to the phrase ‘radical Islam.’ It is a political talking point. It is not a strategy.”
Mateen made 911 calls from the club in which he pledged loyalty to Islamic State group leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, whose organization controls parts of Iraq and Syria.
He also claimed solidarity with the ethnic Chechen brothers, who carried out the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings and with a Palestinian-American who became a suicide bomber in Syria for al-Qaeda offshoot the al-Nusra Front, authorities said.
“We could hear him talking to 911 saying that the reason why he is doing this is because he wants America to stop bombing his country. From that conversation from 911 he pledges allegiance to [the Islamic State group],” said Patience Carter, 20, who was trapped in a bathroom stall at the nightclub as Mateen prowled outside.
US officials were investigating media reports that Mateen might have been gay, but not openly so, and questioning whether that could have driven his attack, according to two people who have been briefed on the investigation and requested anonymity to discuss it.
A former wife of Mateen, Sitora Yusufiy, said her ex-husband had facets of his life that he did not share with his family, such as drinking and going to nightclubs.
“He did have a different side to him that he could not open up to his father about,” Yusufiy told CNN.
She has previously said he was mentally unstable and beat her, and that she fled their home after four months of marriage.
The owner of Pulse, speaking through a representative, denied reports that Mateen had been a regular patron.
“Untrue and totally ridiculous,” Sara Brady, a spokeswoman for club owner Barbara Poma, said in an e-mail when asked about the reports.
Mateen’s father, Seddique Mateen, said soon after the attack that his son had harbored strong anti-gay feelings and on Tuesday, he told reporters his son had never mentioned being homosexual.
“I do not believe he was a whatever you call it,” Seddique Mateen said.
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