Orlando gunman's wife, Noor Salman, 'May face charges'

The wife of the gunman who killed 49 people at a gay nightclub in Orlando could face charges in connection with the attack, according to reports.

Prosecutors have convened a grand jury to investigate Noor Salman, wife of gunmen Omar Mateen, sources quoed by Fox news and Reuters says.

Prosecutors quoted by Fox news said they were seeking to charge Noor Salman as an accessory 49 counts of murder and 53 counts for attempted murder, as well as with failure to warn authorities about the impending attack.

It was possible that Mateen had called his wife from inside the club while the killings were taking place, Fox quoted a source as saying.

Although Salman has been questioned since the attack early on Sunday, she has not been arrested.

US Senator Angus King, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee which received a briefing on the investigation, told CNN that "it appears she had some knowledge of what was going on."

"She definitely is, I guess you would say, a person of interest right now and appears to be co-operating and can provide us with some important information," he added.

On Tuesday, US media reported that Noor Salman had gone with Omar Mateen to buy ammunition and had also driven him to the Pulse nightclub on a previous occasion because he had wanted to survey it.

However, she said she had tried to talk her husband out of carrying out the attack, sources quoted by NBC News said.

Mateen's father, Seddique Mateen, said on Tuesday that Salman - his son's second wife - had returned to the couple's flat on Monday to pick up some clothes. He said she and the couple's young son were still in Florida but declined to say where.

Mateen, 29, who was killed when police stormed the club, pledged allegiance to so-called Islamic State (IS) during the attack, authorities says.

New information has complicated that initial assessment. Several attendees of the Pulse nightclub have said Mateen was a frequent, often belligerent, presence. "He was a homosexual and he was trying to pick up men," one told the Associated Press. A police academy classmate said Mateen had asked him out, and the two attended LGBT clubs together, though he considered Mateen closeted. He was abusive to his former spouse, a woman, was married to another woman at the time of the slayings, and is said to have maintained a profile on LGBT dating app.

On Tuesday, President Barrack Obama said Mateen appeared to have been "an angry, disturbed, unstable young man" who absorbed "extremist information and propaganda over the internet".

Invertigators have said there is no evidence that mateen had been in contact with any outside groups such as IS, Mateen was a US citizen, born in New York to Afghan immigrant parents.



source:
The Guardian