(November
16, 1986 – June 12, 2016) was
an American mass
shooter/mass murderer. He killed at least 49 people and wounded 53
others in a mass shooting at the Pulse gay bar in Orlando, Florida,
before being killed in a gunfight with the police.
Prior to the shooting, he had been investigated by the FBI in
2013 and 2014. Mateen reportedly pledged his allegiance to the Sunnimilitant jihadist group Islamic
State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL)
before the shooting.
Personal life
Mateen was born as Omar Mir Seddique in New York City to Afghan parents, with his father being a
supporter of theMujahideen.
He attended Martin County
High School for one year and also St.
Lucie West Centennial High School, where a schoolmate said he was
bullied. He reportedly held two degrees in science from Indian River
State College, received in 2006 and 2007.
In 2006, he filed a petition for a name change, adding Mateen as
his surname (Persian: متين matīn,
meaning "strong"/"tough").
In 2006 and 2007, Mateen worked for seven months as a prison guard for the Florida
Department of Corrections, leaving the position for an
"administrative matter unrelated to misconduct."
He then worked for the security firm G4S Secure Solutions in Jupiter, Florida, from 2007 until his death. The
company said screenings of Mateen, conducted upon hiring and in 2013, had
raised no red flags. He held an active firearms license and asecurity guard license. A former
coworker who worked with Mateen in a gated community in western Port St.
Lucie Omar Mateen
Mateen married an Uzbekistan-born woman in April 2009. They
separated after four months and divorced in July 2011. Following the nightclub
attack, Mateen's ex-wife told media outlets that during their marriage, Mateen
was mentally unstable, and would beat her and keep her completely
separated from her family. His ex-wife also claimed that he was bipolar and had a history with steroids. He reportedly remarried and had
a three-year-old son.
In 2011 and 2012, Mateen made two trips to Saudi Arabia for Umrah.
After checking with Saudi officials, FBI Director James Comeysaid they found nothing
incriminating about the trips
At the time of the shooting, he lived about 100 miles (160
kilometers) from Orlando, Florida. According
to Florida
Department of Law Enforcement records, he had no criminal
record in Florida. Mateen lived in Fort Pierce, Florida,
but received mail at his parents' home in nearby Port St. Lucie.
Characterization
Mateen's father, Mir Seddique Mateen, who hosted a TV show called Durand Jirga Show on satellite television network Payam-e-Afghan in 2015 in which he
represented himself as a candidate for the President of
Afghanistan, said of his son's actions, "This had nothing
to do with religion." He was quoted as saying that he had seen his son get
angry after witnessing a gay couple kiss in front of his family at a festival marketplace in Miami months
prior to the attack, which he suggested might have been a motivating factor.
Imam Shafiq Rahman at the Fort Pierce
Islamic Center told reporters that Mateen would come to the mosque "three or four times a week"
with his father and his three-year-old son as recently as two days before the
shooting, and said of him, "He was the most quiet guy. He would come and
pray and leave. There was no indication at all of violence." Rahman added
that he did not preach violence toward homosexuals. A former high school
friend and coworker said that despite reports of Mateen's homophobia, a number
of his coworkers at Treasure Coast Square were
gay and Mateen had no obvious conflicts with them.
Alleged
links to terror groups
Mateen first became a person of interest to
the FBI in May 2013, when he came to the FBI's attention after making
"inflammatory" statements at a contract security guard job; Mateen
specifically told coworkers that he had family connections to al-Qaeda and that he was a member of Hezbollah. Hezbollah is an enemy of ISIL, to
which Mateen later pledged allegiance, and FBI
Director James Comey
noted the "contradictory" nature of Mateen's statements. The FBI
opened a preliminary investigation and interviewed Mateen twice; Mateen
admitted making the statements but "explained that he said them in anger
because his co-workers were teasing him." The FBI closed the investigation
after ten months, deeming Mateen not to be a threat. Mateen was on a terrorist
watch list during the investigation but was removed once the
investigation closed.
In July 2014, Mateen's name came to the attention of the FBI
after he was linked to Moner Mohammad Abu
Salha, an American radical who traveled to Syria and committed asuicide bombing there; the two men knew
each other casually and attended the same mosque. The investigation
continued with a focus on Abu
Salha
U.S. Representative Adam Schiff, the ranking Democratic member of the House Intelligence Committee, said that
according to the Department
of Homeland Security, Mateen hadpledged allegiance to the Islamic
State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), though analysts noted that
"at this point, it's anyone's guess as to how involved Omar Mateen was
with either Al Qaeda or ISIS."
Shooting and death
At approximately 2:00 a.m. on June 12, 2016, Mateen entered the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, and began shooting. At 2:22 a.m., he
made a 9-1-1 call in which he pledged allegiance
to ISIL and also referenced Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the Boston Marathon
bombers. Mateen took hostages after police arrived and engaged
in a shootout with him. At approximately 5:00 a.m. police shot and killed
Mateen, ending the attack. In the end, Mateen had killed at least 49 people and
injured 53 more. The attack was the deadliest mass shooting in United States
history, the deadliest incident of violence against LGBT people in U.S.
history, and the deadliest terrorist attack on U.S. soil since September 11, 2001.
@Dimage9maxspotOmarMateen
source:
@freeWikipedia
By:
Muhammed Dakhare
