Another source close to Salman has said that Salman is cooperating with investigators and has volunteered to take a polygraph test.
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Obama and Vice President Joe Biden arrived in Orlando, Florida, four days after a US -born gunman claiming allegiance to various Islamist militant groups carried out the deadliest mass shooting in modern USA history.
One former classmate of Omar Mateen’s 2006 police academy class told The Palm Beach Post that he believed Mateen was gay, saying Mateen once tried to pick him up at a bar.
About two hours after he began the attack that left 49 dead and over 50 injured, Mateen messaged his wife, Noor Salman, asking if she had heard of the incident, investigators told CNN.
Radical Islam: Omar Mateen could not have been more clear or more emphatic about his motivation for killing 49 people and wounding 53 others at an Orlando gay nightclub. Since the attack, Mateen has been dubbed an “Islamic terrorist” by politicians, senior officials and commentators in the US following reports he had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State group.
She ran into him again at a park in November while she was with her young son and Mateen was with his, she said.
“Once the initial shots stopped we were dealing with a hostage situation”, Mina said, noting that, in hostage situations, police first try to negotiate with the shooter.
Mateen carried out the slaughter with an assault weapon and handgun that had been legally purchased although he had twice been investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation for possible connections with militant Islamist groups. Plans to present evidence against her to a grand jury are underway, CNN reported.
The letter also revealed that in May he used Facebook to search for information on the San Bernardino shooters, and on June 4 he searched on “Baghdadi Speech”. So people may come to the mosque with their (own) ideas.
Mateen was employed by the Florida Department of Corrections beginning in October 2007, but was involuntarily dismissed in April of 2007, the department said. They also said they could not provide information on whether Mateen had profiles on those sites as such details are now part of a classified investigation.
“It’s just weird that he snapped like that”, LaSalla said.
Dyer, speaking at a news conference on Friday, said he was unsure if every person killed in the shooting would be buried in Orlando, even as he said they were working to collect funds to help the victims and their families.
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Adam Goldman reports on terrorism and national security for The Washington Post. She focuses on issues relating to intelligence, technology and civil liberties.
