Shooter Posted Rants During Killings

Omar Mateen

In the hours after he blasted his way into an Orlando gay nightclub, and with his victims lying dead or wounded around him, Omar Mateen took to Facebook to pledge his loyalty to ISIS and threaten more attacks on the civilized world, a key lawmaker privy to the gunman’s posts told FoxNews.com Wednesday.

Mateen, who killed 49 people and wounded 53 inside Pulse early Sunday, died when a SWAT team stormed the club. But in the roughly three hours between his initial rampage and his death, the 29-year-old radicalized Muslim broadcast his twisted message of hate on social media, according to Senate Homeland Security Chairman Ron Johnson, R-Wisc.

“I pledge my alliance to (ISIS leader) abu bakr al Baghdadi..may Allah accept me,” Mateen wrote in one post early Sunday morning. “The real muslims will never accept the filthy ways of the west” …“You kill innocent women and children by doing us airstrikes..now taste the Islamic state vengeance.”



Mateen’s social media accounts were taken down before they could be widely viewed by the public, but Johnson’s committee investigators have uncovered some or all of them. The senator has also written a letter to Facebook executives expressing concern about Mateen’s postings and asking for more information on his activities.

“It is my understanding that Omar Mateen used Facebook before and during the attack to search for and post terrorism-related content,” read Johnson’s letter. “According to information obtained by my staff, five Facebook accounts were apparently associated with Omar Mateen.”

Mateen proclaimed his hatred for Westerners in one Facebook post uncovered by Johnson’s committee.

In his final post he said, "In the next few days you will see attacks from the Islamic state in the usa." While he was in the nightclub, Mateen also used his Facebook account to search for media reports about his attack. Fox cited an FBI sources as saying Mateen additionally made 16 phone calls from Pulse, and they are tracking down the recipients of the calls.

Orlando Nightclub Shooting | Graphiq

In other developments:

• U.S. Attorney Lee Bentley refused at a news conference yesterday to say whether charges might be brought against Mateen's wife, Noor Salman, or anyone else. He said they are still investigating and talking to hundreds of people. However, AP cited an official as saying authorities believe Salman knew ahead of time about the attack. Previous repoerts have said Salman told investigators that Mateen had talked about wanting to carry out a jihadist attack, but she'd tried to talk him out of it, and didn't know he'd planned the Pulse attack.
• Mateen wanted to be a police officer, but his application to a police academy at Indian State River College was rejected last year, and he complained that he was denied because he was a Muslim.
• Mateen appears in a newly-discovered clip from a 2012 documentary called The Big Fix about the 2010 BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. In it, Mateen, who was working security for the cleanup, says people are exploiting the disaster to make money, saying everyone is, quote, "hoping for more oil to come out and more people to complain so they'll have the jobs."