The father of the gunman who massacred 49 people in a gay club in Florida says he would have reported him if he had known about his plans.
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Mateen’s father, Mir Seddique, said he was in shock and wasn’t aware of anything his son had been planning.
One US counterterrorism official said there was “no evidence yet that this was directed or connected to ISIS”.
“He was trying to pick up people – men”, he told the Associated Press outside Parliament House, another gay club. She said he was working to become a police officer, but after they married, he became volatile and abusive. “I would like to also thank all the first responders who quickly came to assist and help those in need”, Scott said. Omar Mateen acted normally, the father said.
In agreement was Imam Syed Shafeeq Rahman, who knew Mateen and his family since the shooter was a young boy.
There is a large mirrored dressing table covered with pictures, makeup and taped to the glass is a green card with a child’s hand print, something that a boy like Mateen’s 3-year-old would bring home from daycare.
According to Reuters, Mateen talked about the “killer ISI”, and lashed out at the Taliban for being tools of the agency.
Rahman said in his messages he never spoke against homosexuality, but did speak out against any form of extremism.
Mr Mateen said the attack had “nothing to do with religion”.
She said he aspired to be a police officer and had worked as a correctional officer at a detention centre for juvenile delinquents in Fort Pierce, Florida, and had once sought admission to a police academy. But once again, Mateen was cleared of any wrongdoing.
Daniel Kime, a security guard employed along with Mateen by at G4S in the Fort Pierce area, said he met Mateen briefly three or four times.
“I don’t know if he was, if that was his way of his life, but I don’t believe so”, Seddique Mateen told reporters at his home in Port St. Lucie, Florida. Mateen was a security guard at the G4S company, which identifies itself on its website as “the leading global integrated security company”.
Mateen told reporters that he wouldn’t allow anyone to commit a terrorist act in the United States.
FBI Director James Comey said investigators introduced him to confidential sources, followed him and reviewed some of his communications, but Mateen claimed he made the remarks in anger because co-workers were teasing and discriminating against him because he was Muslim.
Hopper said Mateen’s contact with Abu-Salha was minimal and it was deemed that “he did not constitute a substantive threat at that time”.
“He was mentally unstable and mentally ill”, Yusufiy said.
“I would have arrested him myself”. She wants to keep “weapons of war” off the the streets, she said.
Inside the humble little mosque where Omar Mateen regularly came to pray, a handful of worshipers gathered Sunday evening and struggled, along with the rest of the world, to understand what had driven him to kill.
When Mateen traveled to Saudi Arabia in 2011 and 2012, he did so with his family to take part in surah, a minor pilgrimage that can be made for much of the year, said his father and a Saudi official. “I am as sad and mad as you guys are”, he said from his living room.
Sitora Yusufiy, the 27-year-old ex-wife of Mateen’s, told ABC News Sunday that her former husband was short-tempered and abused her during their brief marriage in 2009.
He said Mateen called during the massacre to pledge allegiance to the Islamic State.
“The FBI asked her not to tell this to the American media”, the boyfriend, who was not named in the report, said.
Rahman said as a physician he fears his non-Muslim patients will now equate him with alleged terrorists like Mateen.
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He said he planned to travel to Orlando and visit those who were injured or lost loved ones in the shooting at a nightclub popular with the city’s gay community. “The Pakistani government attacks them and kills their families and relatives”, he continues.
