Orlando shooter’s father an FBI informant for years
The government has revealed only now that the Pulse nightclub shooter’s father was an FBI informant for 11 years before the attack, lawyers for his widow said Monday.
They said prosecutors also told them in an email Saturday that the government found evidence on the day of the attack that Omar Mateen’s father, Seddique Mateen, had been sending money to Afghanistan and Turkey, and that he had been accused of raising money to fund violence against the government of Pakistan.
Noor Salman’s lawyers said the new information — shared only after prosecutors rested their case — should result in a mistrial or an outright dismissal of the charges against her. The judge didn’t immediately rule on the defense’s motion, and the U.S. attorney’s office declined to comment on the developments.
Salman, now 31 and the mother of a small child, is being tried in federal court in Orlando. She is accused of helping her husband plan his June 2016 attack at the gay nightclub in Orlando, where he killed 49 people.
In court on Monday, an FBI agent testified that they considered trying to develop Omar Mateen as an informant, like his father, after investigating him in 2013 and finding he didn’t have ties to terrorism.
Salman’s lawyers say the government’s belated disclosure about Mateen’s father and his ties to the FBI has prevented them from exploring the possibilities that Seddique Mateen was more directly involved, and that Salman may have been framed to hide the government’s mistakes.
What is clear is that the federal government’s failure to disclose these details is keeping the former Rodeo resident from getting a fair trial, her attorneys said.
The government’s “violations in this case have placed Ms. Salman, the jury, and this Court in a dark wood where the search for truth has been thwarted,” they wrote, paraphrasing and citing 15th century Italian poet Dante Alighieri’s “The Divine Comedy.”
Her lawyers’ federal court motion filed Monday says U.S. Attorney Sara Sweeney sent them an email Saturday revealing some details of the FBI’s involvement with Seddique Mateen’s activities leading up to the Pulse attack.
“I have just received authorization to disclose the following information about Seddique Mateen,” her email said. “Seddique Mateen was a FBI confidential human source at various points in time between January 2005 and June 2016.”
This email was sent after jurors heard Shahla Mateen, Omar’s mother, deny during cross-examination that her husband had any relationship with the FBI.
The email also revealed other details the prosecution didn’t tell jurors, including the discovery in the hours after the shooting that “receipts for money transfers to Turkey and Afghanistan” made in the days and weeks before the shooting were found at Seddique Mateen’s home, and that in 2012, an anonymous tipster had accused Seddique Mateen of “seeking to raise $50,000$100,000 via a donation drive to contribute toward an attack against the government of Pakistan.”