Father, husband and mass killer
ORLaNDO gunman Omar Mateen was ‘laughing frantically’ as he sprayed his victims with bullets during the nightclub massacre that left 49 dead, it was revealed last night.
Mateen fired his assault rifle at 30 terrified clubbers who were hiding in a disabled toilet at the pulse nightclub.
all but one were killed as he fired under and over the door of the toilet. ‘He was laughing frantically as he was spraying people with his gun,’ said a pastor who had spoken to the family of the survivor.
‘The bodies started collapsing and blood was going everywhere in the handicapped stall, 30 people squished in there getting shot. He was laughing like he was making fun of the victims,’ said Deyni Ventura a pastor in nearby Sanford.
During the heat of his murderous rampage Mateen had told police he was inspired by the Boston Marathon bombers. He phoned police three times and pledged solidarity with the killer Tsarnaev brothers, who brought carnage to Boston in 2013. Mateen also claimed allegiance to both Islamic State and al-Nusra – rival terror groups in Syria.
Last night the FBI admitted a catalogue of failings as stunned americans demanded to know how US-born Mateen was able to carry out the worst terrorist attack on US soil since 9/11.
as president Obama called the 29-year-old a ‘homegrown extremist’, a British preacher who gave a vile sermon in Orlando two months ago denied inspiring Mateen. Farrokh Sekaleshfar, a Manchester-born cleric, has urged the execution of gay people.
Mateen slaughtered 49 clubbers and wounded 53 more in the early hours of Sunday when he stormed gay club pulse with an assault rifle he had purchased legally, despite having once been on an FBI terror watch list. In other developments: The gunman had scouted the Disney World resort in Florida as a possible target when he visited with his wife and son in april,
Donald Trump demanded Mr Obama resign for failing to prevent the worst mass gun slaughter in US history,
Hillary Clinton said she was not afraid to condemn radical Islam, and vowed to prioritise stopping ‘lone wolf’ attackers,
Mr Obama poured renewed scorn on lax gun laws saying Mateen had legally ‘walked out’ of a shop with the assault rifle,
Last night it emerged Mateen had been to the Disney World resort in Orlando with his family earlier this year.
photographs from inside Mateen’s apartment last night revealed Disney merchandise. a Mickey and Minnie Mouse calendar is marked ‘ D-Day 10pm’ on June 7. The real D-Day is June 6, raising the question as to whether Manteen’s own ‘D-Day’ had been planned sooner than June 12.
British cleric Mr Sekaleshfar was in Orlando just two months ago delivering radical sermons about homosexuality. The preacher said, in a sermon at the University of Michigan in 2013, that execution of homosexuals was permissible.
In april this year, he took his speech titled ‘How to deal with the phenomenon of homosexuality’ to the Husseini Islamic Center in Sanford, just outside Orlando.
yesterday he said it was very unlikely Mateen had attended because he was a Shia Muslim and the gunman was a Sunni, and insisted he had never had any contact with the killer.
He condemned Mateen as ‘an animal, totally barbaric’.
The american-born gunman was killed after a three-hour siege when a SWaT team blew a hole in the nightclub wall and drove an armoured truck through it.
He might have been able to survive even longer had he been successful in buying military-grade body armour, which he reportedly tried to do a few weeks ago – until a shop turned him away.
Mr Obama said: ‘ This is an example of the kind of homegrown extremism that all of us have been concerned about.’
The president said relaxed gun laws made the job of terrorists easier, adding: ‘We have to do some soul searching.’
FBI director James Comey admitted Mateen was brought in by agents in 2013 and 2014 but released because he was not considered to be a threat. He was taken off a watch list in 2014.
‘A homegrown extremist’