It’s been 10 days since the devastating Orlando shooting at the Pulse nightclub, yet there is quite a bit of mystery surrounding Omar Mateen. We know that the murderer called 911 and pledged allegiance to ISIS on June 12. “I pledge allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi may God protect him, on behalf of the Islamic State,” Mateen said over the phone in Arabic during his rampage at the gay nightclub.
Mateen’s father said that Omar saw a couple of men kissing in Miami and it enraged him.
But then there at least four regular Pulse customers who said they had seen Mateen drinking at the nightclub on multiple occasions. “Sometimes he would go over in the corner and sit and drink by himself, and other times he would get so drunk he was loud and belligerent,” Ty Smith told the Orlando Sentinel.
Another Pulse regular, Kevin West, told the Los Angeles Times that Mateen messaged him on and off for a year using a gay chat app.
Seems like a lot of “research” when all you’re going to do is savagely shoot up everyone in a club. I don’t think that ISIS would be too keen on Mateen using gay apps and going to gay clubs, even for “research” for a slaughter.
Odd.
Now a man has come forward to claim that he was Mateen’s gay lover. The gentleman appeared on the Spanish language television network Univision to expose his alleged tryst with the self-proclaimed Islamic jihadist.
The name, who went by the name of Miguel, told Univision that Mateen became enraged after hooking up with a Puerto Rican man whom he later learned was HIV-positive. He also believes that the gruesome attack on gay nightclub on their “Latino Night” was revenge.
“He adored Latinos, gay Latinos, with brown skin – but he felt rejected. He felt used by them – there were moments in the Pulse nightclub that made him feel really bad. Guys used him. That really affected him,” Miguel said. “I believe this crazy horrible thing he did – that was revenge.”
“He hates gay Puerto Ricans for all the stuff [the HIV-positive man] did to him,” Miguel told Univision Noticias anchor Maria Elena Salinas in an exclusive interview.
Miguel said he met Mateen on the gay-dating app Grindr and they had a sexual relationship for two months that he classified as “friends with benefits.” Miguel claims that he met Omar 15 to 20 times at an Orlando hotel, with the last rendezvous happening in December of 2015. He said that Omar is “100 percent gay.”
“I believe this is not terrorism,” Miguel said of the massacre that took the lives of 49 people. “He said the Muslim religion is a beautiful, beautiful religion, where everything is about love.”
Miguel described Mateen as “a very sweet guy” who loved to be cuddled. He believed Mateen’s second wife knew Omar went to gay bars and he was using his second marriage as a facade.
Miguel said he contacted the FBI and been interviewed three times in person by agents. The FBI confirmed to Univision that they had met with Mateen’s alleged lover.
[Slate]