Noor Zahi Salman said she feared Omar Mateen would attack Pulse nightclub and tried to talk him out of it but did not contact law enforcement, reports say

The wife of the gunman who carried out the deadliest mass shooting on American soil could face criminal charges if investigators conclude that she knew of the attack in advance but failed to warn police.

Noor Zahi Salman told that FBI that her husband, Omar Mateen, had said he was going out to see friends, but she feared he was going to attack a gay nightclub, NBC News reported on Wednesday. She tried to talk him out of it but did not contact law enforcement agencies.

Wielding an AR-15-style semiautomatic rifle and a handgun, Mateen opened fire at the Pulse club in Orlando, Florida, early on Sunday in a three-hour shooting rampage and hostage siege that ended when a Swat team smashed its way in and killed him. There were 49 people killed and 53 were injured.

Angus King, a member of the Senate intelligence committee, which received a briefing on the attack, told CNN: “It appears she [Salman] 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 cooperating and can provide us with some important information.”

Peter King, chairman of the House homeland security subcommittee on counterintelligence and terrorism, told MSNBC: “If it’s true that she did know that it was going to happen and she tried to talk him out of it, then it’s possible criminal action (could be taken) against her, and again there might be more involvement by her, so all that has to be investigated.”

The possibility that Mateen, 29, did not act alone but received support from other individuals or groups is now central to the FBI’s inquiry, King added. “If there’s anybody else that he was dealing with, anyone else he was talking with, anyone else who may have known about this, this is all where the investigation is going now.”

Media reports also suggested that Salman was with her husband when he bought ammunition and a holster. She allegedly told the FBI that she once drove him to Pulse, nearly a two-hour drive from their home in Fort Pierce, Florida, because he wanted to scope it out. Mateen is said to have browsed militant Islamist material on the internet for at least two years before the mass shooting.

As detectives tried to piece together Mateen’s last movements on Saturday night, Orlando mayor Buddy Dyer, who opened a family assistance centre in a stadium on Wednesday, said: “What I know concretely is that he was driving around that evening and visited several locations.”

The FBI director, James Comey, has said the agency is trying to determine whether Mateen had recently visited Disney World, one of the Orlando’s celebrated theme parks, to consider it as a potential target.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Mourners pay their respects at a memorial for the shooting victims. Photograph: Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Disney, which is donating $1m to an official fund for victims of the shooting, installed metal detectors last December but declined to comment on the Mateen case. A spokesperson said: “Unfortunately we’ve all been living in a world of uncertainty, and we have been increasing our security measures across our properties for some time, adding such visible safeguards as magnetometers, additional canine units, and law enforcement officers on site, as well as less visible systems that employ state-of-the-art security technologies.”

Salman will be key to the ongoing investigation as conflicting narratives emerge, including evidence he had been influenced by militant Islamist ideas and reports he might have struggled with his own sexual identity.

FBI to investigate if Orlando gunman's sexuality was a motive in shooting Read more

A survivor of the massacre, Patience Carter, suggested on Tuesday that Mateen had an overt political motive. Cowering in a bathroom, she heard him demand that Americans “stop bombing his country” and pledge allegiance to Islamic State, she said.

Carter, 20, who is African American, told reporters at Florida Hospital: “He even spoke to us directly in the bathroom. He said, ‘Are there any black people in here?’ I was too afraid to answer but there was an African American male in the stall, where the majority of my body was, who had answered and he said, ‘Yes, there are about six or seven of us,’ and the gunman responded back to him and said: ‘You know, I don’t have a problem with black people. This is about my country. You guys suffered enough.’”

The account chimed with previous FBI statements that Mateen had called the 911 emergency service and made reference to both Isis and the Tsarnaev brothers, who were responsible for the Boston bombings. Investigators have said Mateen was probably self-radicalised and there is no evidence that he received any instruction or aid from outside groups such as Isis.

Mateen also called a local 24-hour cable news channel, News 13, the station revealed on its website on Wednesday. Matthew Gentili, who was the producer on duty at the time, recalled that Mateen said: “I’m the shooter. It’s me. I am the shooter ... I did it for Isis. I did it for the Islamic State.”

Soon after the attack, Mateen’s father indicated that his son had strong anti-gay feelings. He recounted an incident when his son became angry when he saw two men kissing in downtown Miami while out with his wife and young son.

Several media reports quoted men as saying they had seen Mateen at Pulse many times or that he had contacted them via gay dating apps, such as Grindr and Jack’d. But Pulse denied that he had ever been a patron. “Untrue and totally ridiculous,” spokeswoman Sara Brady said in an email to Reuters.

Mateen’s ex-wife, Sitora Yusufiy, told CNN she did not know if he was gay but added: “Well, when we had gotten married, he confessed to me about his past that was recent at that time and that he very much enjoyed going to clubs and the nightlife and there was a lot of pictures of him.”

“I feel like it’s a side of him or a part of him that he lived but probably didn’t want everybody to know about.”

Asked by the Guardian about rumours his son was gay, Mateen’s father Seddique Mateen said: “It’s not true. Why, if he was gay, would he do this?”

Seddique Mateen declined to comment specifically on the investigation on Wednesday, saying: “The FBI, they always do a professional job and to the maximum extent of my ability I will support them.”

Mateen, investigated twice by the FBI, was on the government’s terrorist watchlist for 10 months before being taken off. G4S, the security company that employed Mateen, only psychologically evaluated him once, at the start of his nine-year employment with the company and not again after the company was made aware he had been interviewed by the FBI.

Thirty-three people remain in hospital, including six in critical condition. On Tuesday, the first of the seriously injured to speak of their trauma was Angel Colon at the Orlando Regional Medical Center. “He’s shooting everyone that’s already dead on the floor, making sure they’re dead,” he said, speaking from a wheelchair. “I look over, and he shoots the girl next to me. And I’m just there laying down and I’m thinking: ‘I’m next, I’m dead.’



“So I don’t know how, but by the glory of God, he shoots toward my head but it hits my hand, and then he shoots me again and it hits the side of my hip. I had no reaction. I was just prepared to just stay there laying down so he won’t know that I’m alive.”

Orlando terror attack: shooter's father speaks about his son's ‘horrible act’ Read more

The attending trauma surgeon on call that night, Dr Chadwick Smith, said: “It was singularly the worst day of my career and the best day of my career. And I think you can say that of pretty much every person standing up here.”

The atrocity continued to reverberate in Washington DC, where Senate Democrats demanded tighter gun controls. Donald Trump, the Republican presumptive nominee, broke ranks with the party by saying he would meet the influential National Rifle Association lobbying group, which has endorsed him, to discuss an idea for restricting gun purchases by people on terrorism watchlists.

Barack Obama, who will visit Orlando on Thursday, launched a blistering assault against Trump over the candidate’s anti-Muslim rhetoric, which the president described as dangerous and contrary to American values.

“Where does this stop? The Orlando killer, one of the San Bernardino killers, the Fort Hood killer, [they] were all US citizens. Are we going to start treating all Muslim Americans differently? ... Putting them under surveillance?”