The Orlando LGBT nightclub killer described himself as an “Islamic soldier” out to avenge the US war on the Islamic State, according to his phone conversations with police during the 12 June massacre.
To show progress in its investigation, the FBI on Monday released a timeline and partial transcript of Omar Mateen’s 911 calls from the Pulse nightclub. Investigators are said to be looking with skepticism at Mateen’s claim of allegiance to Isis.
While the FBI initially withheld the full transcript of Mateen’s first call, omitting his name and references to the Islamic State, a brief furor that saw the speaker of the House accuse the FBI of “selective editing” led the US justice department to release the full transcript of the first call later on Monday. It released neither the audio of the call nor the transcripts of Mateen’s subsequent calls with Orlando police from inside the nightclub.
In the phone calls, whose contents took place during the killing spree, Mateen pledges fealty to Isis leader “Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi ... on behalf of the Islamic State”. The US war on Isis in Iraq and Syria motivated Mateen to be “out here right now”, he says on a different call.
Yet during Mateen’s 911 calls, which unfolded in three phases from 2.35am to 4.29am, the killer also releases false information, including an empty threat of possessing explosive vests and a promise of vehicles rigged to detonate.
“In the next few days, you’re going to see more of this type of action going on,” Mateen says, something the FBI said as early as the day of the shooting was not a risk stemming from the nightclub assault.
The FBI surprised observers within hours of Mateen’s death, which ended the killing with 49 dead and 53 wounded, by announcing that it considered the mass shooting to be terrorism. While Mateen had on three occasions in 2013 and 2014 been interviewed by officials investigating terrorism, the bureau closed those early inquiries for lack of factual predication to continue. Mateen was also considered to have fabricated a connection to the Boston Marathon bombers.
A feature of Isis terrorism is to permit anyone who so chooses to use its name to advance mutual goals, regardless of any actual ties to the group. On Thursday the CIA director, John Brennan, testified that his agency had found no connection between Mateen and Isis.
Investigators have said they are examining Mateen’s apparently tortured sexuality as a possible motive or contributing factor. Several acquaintances have considered Mateen to have been closeted and at war internally with his sexual identity.
NPR reported that investigators have not found telltale signs associated with Islamist radicalization, such as a change in mosques or abrupt shifts in behavior or family associations.
“We don’t know the true nature of what his allegiance may or may not be. He claimed allegiance to both [Isis] and Hezbollah, even though both [Isis] and Hezbollah are fighting each other. Unless he’s of a Swiss bent, I don’t know we can just take his word for his allegiances,” said a US security official who was not cleared to speak for the record, adding that previous Mateen statements “have either been disproven or been incongruous with reality”.
The unfolding FBI inquiry, the official said, could “go anywhere from [Mateen being] a true radical at the time he pulled the trigger to a deep sense of self-loathing at potentially being homosexual, a self-loathing which has its own dangerous effects”.
Mateen began his attack on Pulse at 2.02am. He first contacted 911 dispatchers at 2.35am, for a boast-filled conversation that lasted about 50 seconds and began with a familiar Arabic preamble of respect for God. It was on that call that Mateen declared loyalty to Isis.
In two subsequent waves, at 3.03am and then 3.24am, Mateen was in contact with police crisis negotiators responding to his assault. On those calls, Mateen alluded to Isis’s November attack in Paris, although the CIA’s Brennan contrasted that attack with Mateen’s, as Isis command in Syria ordered the carnage in France.
The FBI alluded to learning “significant information” on the attack from survivors it was able to evacuate by removing an air conditioning unit through a back Pulse window around 4.21am. By 4.29am, according to the FBI timeline, survivors told police Mateen threatened to release waves of hostages strapped with explosive vests. In fact, Mateen did not possess any on the scene.
By 5.02am, Swat and hazardous-device units of the Orlando police breached the exterior of the club. Police reported shooting Mateen dead 13 minutes later.
It remained unclear why the FBI released only partial aspects of Mateen’s 911 calls, which constitute the lion’s share of evidence for his claimed allegiance to Isis, and continued to withhold the transcripts of his later calls to police. Reportedly, Mateen repeated his invented connections to the Boston Marathon bombers on the call, as well as pledging simultaneous loyalties to Isis enemy Hezbollah and rival al-Qaida.
The US attorney general, Loretta Lynch, told CNN on Sunday that releasing the full transcript risked “re-victimizing those people that went through this horror”.
Releasing the initial excerpts, the FBI said it was “at this time” withholding the full transcripts, the audio, and the names of Mateen and the “person/group to whom he pledged allegiance” owing to “respect for the victims of this horrific tragedy”.
But after House speaker Paul Ryan and others accused the FBI of downplaying Mateen’s declarations of adherence to the Islamic State, the US justice department issued the unredacted transcript of Mateen’s first call, saying that the suspicions the withheld sections engendered caused “an unnecessary distraction from the hard work that the FBI and our law enforcement partners have been doing to investigate this heinous crime.”
Ryan cheered the justice department for “revers[ing] its decision,” but continued to criticize the handling of the episode.
“The attempt to selectively edit the record reflects a broader, more serious problem: this administration’s continued effort to downplay and distract from the threat of radical Islamist terrorism,” Ryan said.