The father of the Muslim terrorist who killed 49 people at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, in June 2016 was on the FBI’s payroll, according to new evidence presented in court:
A motion filed by Omar Mateen's wife, seeking to dismiss the charges, reveal: FBI just admitted that Omar's father, Seddique, worked with the FBI as an informant for 11 years (2005-16) & himself was under investigation for sending $$ to Afghanistan & Turkey pic.twitter.com/9jH2euP3pJ
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) March 26, 2018
Defense attorneys for Noor Salman, the wife of Pulse nightclub shooter Omar Mateen, filed a motion late Sunday seeking to have her case dismissed due to evidence prosecutors failed to disclose before the trial began. Included in that evidence: that Mateen’s father, Seddique, was an informant for the FBI for eleven years.
Salman, reportedly a battered wife with an IQ of only 84, is being prosecuted on charges of aiding and abetting her husband’s attack and obstruction of justice for lying to the FBI. She originally denied having knowledge of Mateen’s plan to launch a terrorist attack. After being interrogated for hours by the FBI, she admitted knowing of his plans.
According to Bruce Frumkin, a clinical psychologist: “She said that after hours of questioning, with law enforcement telling her that they knew she aided her husband, and according to her, threats that her son would be taken away and would be raised in a ‘Christian home,’ she said she eventually relented and signed the statements so she could be allowed to go home.”
Salman admitted that she and Mateen cased the nightclub together on June 8, 2016, four days before the shooting.
Frumkin wrote in his report that Salman, in addition to having a low IQ, is also “a highly suggestible individual” to interrogation tactics used by law enforcement.
U.S. District Judge Paul Byron said he would consider the motion as time permits: “I’m not going to address it right now,” he said. “It’s going to take too much time.”
As PJ Media reported on the day of the Pulse nightclub massacre, Omar Mateen was a “known wolf” — he had been investigated by the FBI in 2013 and 2014. The defense is arguing that the FBI’s eleven year relationship with Mateen’s father “played a significant role” in their decision not to indict his son in that earlier investigation:
Noor Salman's lawyers say FBI hid these key facts until now out of embarrassment: it was due to FBI's close relationship w/Mateen's father that they didn't arrest Mateen when they investigated him in 2013. Also, prosecution of Noor intended to protect real accomplice: FBI's asset pic.twitter.com/YGGq92E8Fw
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) March 26, 2018
“It is apparent from the Government’s belated disclosure that Ms. Salman has been defending a case without a complete set of facts and evidence that the Government was required to disclose,” attorney Fritz Scheller argued in the court filing.
The FBI also investigated Mateen’s father after the shooting, when agents found receipts for money transfers to Turkey and Afghanistan, according to the motion.
Scheller argued that if Salman’s defense team had known about those transfers, they would have “investigated whether a tie existed between Seddique Mateen and his son, specifically whether Mateen’s father was involved in or had foreknowledge of the Pulse attack”:
That would be relevant to Salman’s defense, Scheller said, because the government has claimed she helped her husband concoct a cover story to tell his parents about where he was going the night prior to the early-morning mass shooting at Pulse.
If Seddique Mateen had “some level of foreknowledge” about his son’t plot, a cover story “would have been completely unnecessary,” the motion contends.
Seddique Mateen was on the government’s witness list but was never called to testify, the Sentinel reported. His wife, Shahla Mateen, testified instead.
As PJ Media previously reported, the elder Mateen has an interesting bio. In April 2016, he visited Congress and the State Department to do advocacy work on behalf of Afghanistan. He has also hosted a pro-Afghan television show where he expressed support for the Taliban, and he apparently ran for president of Afghanistan. According to the Washington Post, he even portrayed himself as the president of Afghanistan in a video he posted on Facebook.
His son was featured in a 2012 anti-oil documentary called The Big Fix by the film company Green Planet Productions. Omar Mateen was working as a guard for the security company G4S at the time, and was shown in uniform talking with a reporter near a Pensacola, Florida, beach following the Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010.
In August of 2016, Seddique Mateen was spotted seated prominently behind Hillary Clinton at a campaign rally in Kissimmee, Florida:
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