Seddique Mateen condemns son for nightclub attack and appears to suggest it is for God to enact punishment on gay people

The father of the Orlando gunman, Omar Mateen, has posted a video in which he condemns the atrocity committed by his son but then appears to suggest it is for God to enact “punishment” against gay people.



Seddique Mateen posted the video, which is in Dari, the variety of Persian language spoken in Afghanistan, on his Facebook page in the early hours of Monday morning, shortly after a brief telephone interview with the Guardian.

His son Omar has been identified as the 29-year-old gunman who stormed an LGBT nightclub and shot dead 50 people in the worst mass shooting in US history.

The attack, which began shortly after 2am on Sunday morning, also left 53 people injured. President Barack Obama called the attack an “act of terror and an act of hate”.

Addressing the people of Afghanistan, Seddique Mateen said in the video: “I don’t know what made him [do this], I have no idea, I had no idea that he felt resentful in his heart and had gone to the gay [he uses the derogatory word hamjensbazi] club and killed men and women there.



“I am very sad and I’ve announced this to the American people as well. Why did he do this act during this holy month of Ramadan. On the topic of being hamjensbazi, punishment and the things that they do, God will give the punishment. This is not the issue for a follower of God and he [Omar] that did this has greatly saddened me. I wanted you to know this. God give all youth complete health to keep the real path of the holy religion of Islam in mind.”

Shortly before posting the video, Seddique Mateen told the Guardian in a phone interview that his son, who was born in New York, was an American who did not identify with their family’s Afghan heritage.



“Omar was an American and not an Afghan-American. He was born in the US and never went to Afghanistan. He attended school here, worked here and his whole life was here,” he said.

He described the atrocity as an “unbelievable act” that had left his family devastated and confused.

“If he was alive we could ask why he did this. He never showed any signs of mental illness or links to extremist groups,” he said. “No father or family should ever have to go through this kind pain.”

Earlier in the video, he describes his son as “a very good and well-educated son with a wife and a child”.

Twenty minutes into the massacre, Omar Mateen made a 911 call in which he reportedly referred both to Islamic State and the Tsarnaevs, the brothers who carried out the Boston Marathon bombings in April 2013.



In his interview, his father told the Guardian: “I don’t know if he had any connections to Isis.”

Seddique Mateen also played down the significance of his widely reported remarks in a previous interview in which he recounted how his son had once become enraged at the sight of two men kissing.

“We were in downtown Miami, Bayside, people were playing music. And he saw two men kissing each other in front of his wife and kid, and he got very angry,” Seddique Mateen told NBC. “They were kissing each other and touching each other, and he said, ‘Look at that. In front of my son, they are doing that.’ And then we were in the men’s bathroom, and men were kissing each other.”

However, in his interview with the Guardian, Seddique Mateen indicated he believed the importance of the incident had been overblown. “But that was a couple of months ago and he never talked about it afterwards,” he said. “I don’t think that incident would trigger this kind of violent reaction.”

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Seddique Mateen’s own political views, including his occasional support of the Taliban – as expressed in internet videos – have come under close scrutiny since his son was identified as the gunman behind the shooting.

He previously hosted a TV show on a California-based channel for the Afghan diaspora called Payam-e-Afghan.

A source at the channel said it decided to stop using Seddique Mateen as a host about a year ago. In one of his recent videos on Facebook, Seddique Mateen is dressed in military fatigue and sitting next to an Afghan flag, acting as if he is the president of Afghanistan.

Seddique Mateen tells “revolutionaries of Afghanistan” that they are “strong enough to overthrow” the current leaders and US-backed government of Afghanistan.

Asked about the controversy surrounding those online videos, Seddique Mateen told the Guardian they were were performances intended to convey his activist message. “I’m just defending Afghanistan,” he said. “Everyone knows that Pakistan is taking our land.”

He added that he could not be held responsible for his son’s actions. “You can have a child, send them to school and hope they grow up to be responsible adults,” he said. “What he does and what he did, he was an adult.”