That visit may have overlapped with Gay Days Orlando, an annual event that brings thousands of LGBT people to central Florida, the newspaper reported, citing a United States law enforcement official briefed on the investigation. “I said, ‘Hey, ‘ and he turned and said, ‘Hey, ‘” and nodded his head, West recalled. She said that she tried to discourage her husband from carrying out the attack, NBC News reported. He was then suspended for two weeks.
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Another source also told investigators that Mateen’s radicalized tendencies came after browsing through militant Islamic material online at least two years before the incident.
In another interview, Hall told the New York Daily News, “Omar even as a kid had issues and always caused problems in school and hated women”. But Van Horn said his friends soon “told me they didn’t want me talking to him, because they thought he was a odd person”.
“The first thing I want to say is that club should have had good security”, the Afghani immigrant told Sky News.
Mateen also allegedly pursued men with the help of dating apps, including Jack’d, Grindr, and Adam4Adam.
Van Horn, a retired pharmacist, said he met Mateen once, and the younger man talked about his ex-wife.
CBS News has spoken to a U.S. official with knowledge of the investigation who says club-goers had told investigators they had seen Omar Mateen at Pulse previously.
That assessment was corroborated by a onetime classmate in the police academy at Indian River Community College, who told the Palm Beach Post that he and several classmates “went to a few gay bars with” Mateen, whom he believed to be a closeted gay man.
Yusufiy’s fiancé, Marco Dias, spoke on her behalf on Brazilian television station SBT Brazil, revealing that Mateen had “gay tendencies” and his father had called him gay in front of her.
“I look over and he shoots the girl next to me and I was just there laying down and thinking: ‘I’m next, I’m dead, ‘” he said.
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.
Mateen was reported by the Federal Bureau of Investigation to have declared support for various extremist or militant groups at odds with each other. “I don’t know”, she said to Burnett.
Authorities said Mateen had professed his allegiance to the Islamic State in a 911 call during Sunday’s attack.
“It appears she had some knowledge of what was going on”, said US Senator Angus King, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which had a briefing on the attack on Tuesday.
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Meantime, the Orlando Sentinel reported that Mateen had visited a number of Disney properties in recent months, and was most recently spotted early in June in Disney Springs, an outdoor shopping and entertainment complex in Walt Disney World in Orlando.
