Pulse gunman’s father was an FBI informer, lawyer says
— Seddique Mateen, the father of the Pulse nightclub shooter, was an FBI informer for more than a decade before facing an investigation into financial transfers abroad, a lawyer for the shooter’s widow said in a weekend court filing.
The lawyer, Fritz Scheller, said in a Sunday motion that the case against the wife, Noor Salman, 31, should be dismissed because prosecutors waited until Saturday, after they had rested their case, to reveal to him the relationship that Mateen had with authorities.
“It is apparent from the government’s belated disclosure that Ms. Salman has been defending a case without a complete set of facts and evidence that the government was required to disclose,” Scheller wrote in the motion.
Salman faces charges of aiding and abetting her husband, Omar Mateen, in the shooting in Orlando, Florida, in which he killed 49 people and wounded 53 others. Her trial began this month. If convicted, she faces life in prison.
In the filing, Scheller said that a federal prosecutor notified him by email Saturday that Mateen’s father was a confidential FBI source at various times between January 2005 and June 2016, when the attack occurred.
The prosecutor also reportedly said that, after the shooting, the government began an investigation into financial transfers Mateen had made to Turkey and Afghanistan, an inquiry of which he had not been made aware. Authorities also received a tip in 2012 accusing him of trying to raise money for an attack against the Pakistan government, according to the email.
Scheller argued in the motion that by withholding that information for so long, the federal government had robbed him of the opportunity to investigate a line of defence, violating Salman’s constitutional rights to due process and a fair trial. If the court does not dismiss her case, he said, it should declare a mistrial.
Had Salman’s lawyers known, they could have investigated various lines of argument, Scheller said, including whether the senior Mateen, not Salman, sought to support the Islamic State or whether the FBI targeted her to avoid responsibility for failures related to its use of him as an informer.
The email to Scheller was sent by a lawyer from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Florida. A spokesman offered no response to or comment on the motion, which was being argued in court Monday.
Salman’s lawyers have depicted her as a devoted parent, a woman with limited intelligence and a victim of cheating and abuse, a portrait that may play on the jury’s sympathies and pose a challenge for prosecutors.