Authorities are investigating how a mosque frequented by the Orlando night club shooter was set ablaze early Monday morning in Fort Pierce, Fla.
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The St. Lucie County Sheriff’s Office said on its official Facebook page that surveillance video shows someone approaching the Islamic Center of Fort Pierce around 12:30 a.m. Monday, moments before a flash was seen and the fire started.
Thompson told reporters that “evidence has revealed that this fire was set intentionally”.
“I don’t want to speculate on a motive”, he said.
‘We all know the implications of the date and the time of year, this is the 9/11 anniversary. “Is that related? I would not want to speculate but certainly that is in the back of our minds”.
In addition to Sunday’s 9/11 anniversary, Monday marks the beginning of the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha.
A man arrives for prayers at the Islamic Center of Fort Pierce where Pulse nightclub shooter Omar Mateen had worshiped June 14, 2016 in Fort Pierce, Florida.
Parsons, a gutter installer with the phrase “trust no one” tattooed on his chest, said his mother’s oncologist attends the mosque.
“So far as we here in Fort Pierce are concerned, we are always very conscious-consciously speaking about peace, about love, about unity”, Rahman told CNN.
The arson is nearly certainly a hate crime: It happened around the first day of Eid al-Adha, one of the most important Muslim holidays, around the three-month anniversary of the shooting at Pulse nightclub in Orlando, when Omar Mateen killed 49 people, and the day after the 15th anniversary of 9/11. He killed 49 people at Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, pledging allegiance to ISIS over the phone before being killed by police.
Moner Mohammad Abu Salha, the infamous “American Taliban” who traveled to Syria to become a suicide bomber also went attended the same mosque.
The Islamic Center of Fort Pierce has experienced other trouble in recent months. Early on July 2, deputies were called by a man who said someone was trying to burglarize a vehicle.
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Ibrahim Hooper, national spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said attacks against the American Muslim community are becoming a daily occurrence in America since Islamophobia moved into the mainstream. CAIR said the victim was a Muslim and the attacker hurled slurs. It was a vicious attack.
