According to recently released transcripts, Orlando gunman Omar Mateen named a U.S. air strike as one of his primary motivations for carrying out the Orlando nightclub massacre. While holed up in a bathroom, Mateen told a hostage negotiator he was angry about the death of a top Islamic State operative.
Abu Wahib was killed in an airstrike just weeks before Mateen opened fire at the Pulse nightclub, killing 49 people and wounding 53.
“Yo, the air strike that killed Abu Wahid a few weeks ago… that’s what triggered it, OK?” said Mateen.
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“They should have not bombed and killed Abu Wahid,” he said. “Do your f—-ng homework and figure out who Abu Wahid is, OK?”
Mateen also referred to one of the bombers of the 2013 Boston Marathon, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, as his “homeboy,” and told the negotiator that the United States needs to stop all bombing in Iraq and Syria.
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“What am I to do here when my people are getting killed over there. You get what I’m saying?” he said. “You need to stop the U.S. air strikes. They need to stop the U.S. air strikes, OK?”
Mateen told the negotiator his name was “Islamic soldier.”
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He later died in a shootout with police.
Initial media reports tried to pin the shooting on Mateen “homophobe” and “wife beater.” Three days after the attack, an editorial in the New York Times wrote it was “evident that Mr. Mateen was driven by hatred toward gays and lesbians.” Government officials also downplayed the true motivates despite knowledge of Mateen claiming allegiance to the Islamic State.
“I cannot tell you definitively that we will ever narrow it down to one motivation,” Attorney General Loretta Lynch said in a press conference after the attack. “People often act out of more than one motivation.”
President Barack Obama also claimed it was an “act of hate.”
“So whatever the motivations of the killer, whatever influences led him down the path of violence and terror, whatever propaganda he was consuming from ISIL and al-Qaeda, this was an act of terrorism but it was also an act of hate,” he said.
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Heather Fagan, deputy chief of staff in the Orlando mayor’s office, told the Free Beacon the transcripts were withheld by the FBI during the Joint Terrorism Task Force investigation.
“The Department of Justice and the FBI recently advised the city of the FBI’s determination that the 911 calls no longer need to be protected as their release would not compromise the ongoing investigation into the Pulse nightclub massacre,” Fagan said.
Rep. Mike Pompeo, R-Kan., a member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, was perturbed that early reports didn’t mention Mateen’s declared motivation, even though he told the crisis negotiator that U.S. involvement in Syria and Iraq motivated the attack.
“This fact differs dramatically and widely from the initial media and police reports,” he said.”It is important for us to understand why that was the case. If officials intentionally sought to downplay the threat from radical Islamic terrorism, that would not only be wrong, but would also be a disservice to the American public.”
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