Widow of Pulse nightclub killer goes on trial, a challenge for prosecutors

Federal prosecutors faced a number of challenges when the trial of the only person charged in the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting, one of the deadliest in U.S. history, began Thursday.

Noor Salman, the 31-yearold widow of the gunman, Omar Mateen, is accused of aiding and abetting her husband in advance of the attack, in which he killed 49 people and wounded 53. Prosecutors said she also later lied to the FBI about what she knew about her husband’s plans.

Salman, who faces life in prison if convicted, has denied any involvement in or prior knowledge of Mateen’s plans to gun down dozens of people in the name of the Islamic State group. Mateen was killed by law enforcement officers during a standoff after the shooting.

Her defense lawyers are likely to portray her as a victim of an abusive husband who kept her in the dark about his deadly plot. Salman was a stay-at-home mother to a 3-year-old at the time of the attack, and her lawyers may argue she feared for her own safety and her son’s if she crossed her husband.

Mateen began abusing her about six months into their marriage, Salman said in a November 2016 interview with The New York Times, her only public comments since the shooting. While she was pregnant, she said, he punched her in the shoulder so hard that it bruised. Afterward, before they went to meet his parents, she said he told her: “Wipe your eyes. This stays between us, or it’s going to get worse.”

Salman said she was unaware of her husband’s plans to attack the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Fla.

“I don’t condone what he has done,” she said. “I am very sorry for what has happened. He has hurt a lot of people.”

Salman was arrested in January 2017 in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she had been staying with family. She has been in jail since then.

Prosecutors have said Salman made financial arrangements with Mateen in advance of the attack and fabricated a cover story for her husband hours before the shooting. The FBI said in statements to the court she later confessed to agents that she had joined Mateen on a trip to scout the nightclub as a possible target.