By: Barbara Liston
ORLANDO, Fla. | By Barbara Liston
(Reuters) - A man armed with an assault rifle and pledging loyalty to
Islamic State militants killed 50 people during a gay pride celebration
at a nightclub in Orlando, Florida, early on Sunday in the deadliest
mass shooting in U.S. history, a rampage President Barack Obama
denounced as an act of terror and hate.
Police killed the gunman,
who was identified as Omar Mateen, 29, a New York-born Florida resident
and U.S. citizen who was the son of immigrants from Afghanistan and had
twice been questioned by FBI agents in recent years, authorities said.
Mateen's
former wife described him as emotionally and mentally disturbed with a
violent temper, yet who aspired to be a police officer. He also worked
as an armed guard for the security firm G4S, the world's largest,
according to the company.
Law enforcement officials were probing
evidence suggesting the attack was inspired by Islamic State militants,
although they said there was no proof that Mateen had worked directly
with the group.
As the shooting rampage was unfolding, Mateen
"made calls to 911 this morning in which he stated his allegiance to the
leader of the Islamic State," said Ronald Hopper, the FBI's assistant
special agent in charge on the case.
Shots rang out at the
crowded Pulse nightclub in the heart of Orlando, one of the most popular
U.S. tourist destinations, as some 350 patrons were attending a Latin
music event in conjunction with gay pride week celebrations. Clubgoers
described scenes of terror and pandemonium, with one man who escaped
saying he hid under a car and bandaged a wounded stranger with his
shirt.
"Words cannot and will not describe the feeling of that,"
Joshua McGill said in a posting on Facebook. "Being covered in blood.
Trying to save a guy's life."
Fifty-three people were wounded in
the rampage. It ranked as the deadliest single U.S. mass shooting
incident, eclipsing the massacre of 32 people at Virginia Tech
University in 2007.
"We know enough to say this was an act of
terror, an act of hate," Obama said in a speech from the White House.
"As Americans, we are united in grief, in outrage and in resolve to
defend our people."
U.S. officials cautioned, however, they had no conclusive evidence of any direct connection with any foreign extremist group.
"So
far as we know at this time, his first direct contact was a pledge of
bayat (loyalty) he made during the massacre," said a U.S.
counterterrorism official. "This guy appears to have been pretty screwed
up without any help from anybody."
The attacker was carrying an
AR-15-style assault rifle and a handgun, Orange County Sheriff Jerry
Demings said. He also had an unidentified "device," said Orlando Police
Chief John Mina.
The shooting was nearly certain to reignite
emotional debates over American gun laws and homeland security in what
is shaping up to be a vitriolic U.S. presidential campaign between
Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Donald Trump.
The attack
came six months after a married couple in California - a U.S.-born son
of Pakistani immigrants and a Pakistani-born woman he married in Saudi
Arabia, fatally shot 14 people in San Bernardino in an attack inspired
by Islamic State. That couple died in a shootout with police hours after
their attack on a holiday party attended by the husband's co-workers.
'UNIMAGINABLE'
The
Florida shooting evolved into a hostage situation, which a team of SWAT
officers ended around dawn when they used armored cars to storm the
club before killing the gunman. It was unclear when the victims were
killed.
Officials in Orlando, a city of 270,000 people and home
to tourist attractions including the Disney World resort, were visibly
shocked at the high death toll, which they had initially put at 20.
"We're
dealing with something that we never imagined and is unimaginable,"
Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer said. He said 39 people died inside the club,
two outside, and nine others died after being rushed to hospital.
Orlando
Regional Medical Center hospital said it had admitted 44 victims,
including nine who died, and had carried out 26 operations on victims.
The
city began releasing names of the victims on Sunday, with the first
seven identified as Edward Sotomayor Jr., Stanley Almodovar, Luis Omar
Ocasio-Capo, Juan Ramon Guerrero, Eric Ivan Ortiz-Rivera, Peter
Gonzalez-Cruz and Luis Vielma.
Mateen had twice been interviewed
by FBI agents, in 2013 and 2014, after making comments to co-workers
indicating he supported militant groups, but neither interview led to
evidence of criminal activity, the FBI's Hopper said.
Hopper said
Mateen was questioned in 2014 about his contacts with Moner Mohammad
Abu-Salha, a U.S. citizen who also had lived in Florida and became a
suicide bomber in Syria that year.
Near Boulder, Colorado,
Mateen's former wife, Sitora Yusufiy, told reporters he worked for a
time as a correctional officer at a detention center for juvenile
delinquents in Fort Pierce, Florida, and had once sought admission to a
police academy.
She said she had been beaten and otherwise
physically abused by Mateen during outbursts of temper in which he would
"express hatred towards everything." Eventually, she was "rescued" from
Mateen by family members who intervened in a stormy marriage that
ultimately ended in divorce, she said.
"I know he had a history
of steroids," Yusufiy told reporters outside a home where she was
staying with a man she identified as her current fiance. She also
described Mateen as "emotionally unstable," "mentally ill" and bipolar.
Deborah Sherman, an FBI spokeswoman in Denver, confirmed that federal agents had interviewed Yusufiy in Colorado.
The
imam of the Florida mosque where Mateen attended prayers for nearly 10
years described him as a soft-spoken man who would visit regularly but
rarely interact with others in the congregation.
CANDIDATES WEIGH IN
Within
hours of the shooting, the presumptive presidential nominees of both
major political parties weighed in with statements on the tragedy.
Trump,
who has called for a temporary ban on Muslims entering the United
States, said he was "right on radical Islamic terrorism" and called on
Obama to resign because he did not say the words "radical Islam" in his
statement responding to the shooting.
Clinton echoed Obama's
comments calling the attack both an act of terror and a hate crime,
adding that the massacre "reminds us once more that weapons of war have
no place on our streets."
If confirmed as an act of terrorism, it
would be the deadliest such attack on U.S. soil since Sept. 11, 2001,
when al Qaeda-trained hijackers crashed jetliners into New York's World
Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania, killing some
3,000 people.
The choice of target was especially heart-wrenching
for members of the U.S. lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender
community, said LGBT advocacy group Equality Florida.
"Gay clubs
hold a significant place in LGBTQ history. They were often the only safe
gathering place and this horrific act strikes directly at our sense of
safety," the group said in a statement. "We will await the details in
tears of sadness and anger."
In an apparently unrelated incident
on Sunday, a heavily armed man from Indiana who said he was headed to a
Los Angeles-area gay pride festival was arrested in nearby Santa Monica,
California, where police found guns and chemicals to make explosives in
his car.
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