Orlando Gunman Omar Mateen Name-drops Obscure ISIS Terrorist in 911 Transcripts
You have to tell America to stop bombing Syria and Iraq,” Pulse nightclub shooter Omar Mateen instructs a police negotiator, in newly released 911 transcripts. “They are killing a lot of innocent people. What am I to do here when my people are getting killed over there. You get what I’m saying?”
Mateen makes this demand more than once in multiple calls. The gunman who killed 49 people at a gay nightclub in Orlando pledges allegiance to the Islamic State, also more than once, though the transcript omits part of his declaration:
Mateen identifies himself to police on the calls, which start about a half-hour after he stormed the nightclub. “I want to let you know I’m in Orlando,” he states, “and I did the shooting.” There are three calls, the first lasting only a few minutes. The last call ends around 3:25 a.m. In the conversations, Mateen asks to be called “Mujahideen” and “Islamic soldier.” The shooter claims that he has explosives, a threat that turned out to be false. He says he is wearing a vest like “what they used in France,” then he recants, saying it’s a vest “to go out to a wedding.” He mentions the Boston Marathon bomber: “My homeboy Tamerlan Tsarnaev did his thing on the Boston Marathon, my homeboy [unidentified name] did his thing, okay, so now it’s my turn, okay?”
Audio has not been released, but these transcripts, made public this past Friday, offer the clearest details of Mateen’s stated motivation to commit mass murder. The FBI released partial transcripts soon after the massacre, which included bits and pieces of the conversations between Mateen and authorities that pointed to his radicalization. But these fuller transcripts hint at just how deep his infatuation with ISIS may have been, even for a “homegrown” terrorist.
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/09/orlando-gunman-omar-mateens-911-transcripts-released.html
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