Emergency responders received a call at about 12:31 a.m. Monday reporting a fire at the Islamic Center of Fort Pierce, Florida, the St. Lucie County Sheriff’s Office said.
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In the video, a man is seen approaching the building from the northeast side, and then a flash can be seen, according to the sheriff’s department.
Asked if he believes this was a hate crime, Thompson said the fact that the arsonist struck on the same day that the nation marked the 15th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks does raise flags.
On June 12, Mateen shot 49 people dead and wounded 53 at the Pulse night club in Orlando, Florida, before being killed by police. Law enforcement officials are investigating the fire as an arson and say that surveillance cameras show a person approaching the mosque moments before the blaze on Monday morning.
Mateen, who attended the Islamic Center, was killed as SWAT team members breached the building to rescue victims trapped inside.
‘Of course, because this is a place of worship and of course because this incident occurred after the anniversary of 9/11, we’re going to explore that’.
“I would not want to speculate, but certainly that is in the back of our minds”, he said.
Firefighters work at the scene of a fire at the Islamic Center of Fort Pierce, Florida, early on September 12. No one was in the mosque at the time and no one was injured, but the fire gutted much of the building.
A mosque previously attended by Omar Mateen, the perpetrator of the Pulse nightclub massacre in Orlando, has been set on fire in what investigators called a case of arson. “The last two months of 2015 saw 34 incidents in which mosques were targeted by vandals who want to intimidate worshippers”.
On July 2, Taylor Anthony Mazzanti, 25, was accused of attacking a member of the Islamic Center in its parking lot and then yelling at him to “go back to your country”.
“For any group of people to be attacked and persecuted, is wrong”, she said.
“A fire at any place of worship is always a tragedy”, St. Lucie County Sheriff’s Office Major David Thompson told reporters.
The arsonist “is terrorizing our community because we don’t know where he is at and we don’t know what he is capable of doing”, said Wilfredo Amr Ruiz, a Florida spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations. The mosque is where Omar Mateen worshiped.
The attack occurred at the start of the Islamic holiday of Eid ul-Adha.
One of the attendees at the mosque said the Fort Pierce Islamic Center was “like any other mosque”. The holiday commemorates the biblical patriarch Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son Isaac (Ishmael in the Islamic tradition), as per God’s command.
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On a photo of the mosque posted to Facebook by the sheriff’s office Monday morning, none of the comments expressed dismay or sadness at the act of arson.
