Overnight report began popping up that the terrorist who killed 49 people and injured 53 others at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando may have been a regular at the club. The New York Post summarizes:
The ex-wife of Orlando mass killer Omar Mateen claimed Monday that she believed he was homosexual — as it was revealed that he frequented the gay nightclub where he staged the nation’s worst massacre in modern times.
Sitora Yusufiy, who was married to Mateen in 2009 for three months, made the shocking claim on Brazilian television station SBT Brazil.
Her fiancé, Marco Dias, speaking in Portuguese on her behalf, said Yusufiy believed that Mateen had “gay tendencies” and that his father had called him gay in front of her. Dias also claimed “the FBI asked her not to tell this to the American media.”
The bombshell came as a male former classmate of Omar Mateen said he had been asked out romantically by the mass killer, who reportedly was a virtual regular at the Pulse nightclub, having visited it more than a dozen times over the years.
Others report the Mateen regularly used gay hookup apps and was “creepy.”
If Mateen was a “lone wolf” terrorist, maybe Pulse was just a natural target for him and there was no particular significance. Admittedly, that seems pretty far fetched as he was married with a child and if he was gay, or closeted, his family, culture, and religion all tended to reinforce a worldview that homosexuality was to be punished by death. The father didn’t exactly back away from that view after the shooting, instead parsing words that it was not man’s duty to enforce that sanction…
