Orlando Shooter Reportedly Used Gay Dating Apps, Frequented Pulse – Omar Mateen

Cord Cedeno, another Pulse regular – and one of the patrons who told the Sentinel that he’d seen Mateen at the club before – also told MSNBC he’d seen Mateen on a gay hookup app. “Men”, Jim Van Horn, 71, told The Associated Press. And then go over and buy a drink or something.

The jihadi who gunned down scores of revelers at Orlando’s Pulse had visited the gay nightclub as many as a dozen times and had used a gay dating app to chat with a man who later saw him enter the club before the Sunday morning massacre. The couple have a three-year-old son.

Multiple media outlets are reporting that some Pulse regulars recognized Mateen, saying that he had spent time at the nightclub before the shooting early Sunday.

Like many young men, Mateen worked a series of unremarkable jobs after high school. He eventually found stability with a security guard job in South Florida.

Asked why he thought his son had a gay dating app on his mobile phone, Mr Mateen said he wished his son was alive so he could ask. When gunfire erupted, “I felt like I was over in Iraq”, he said.

“He walked directly past me”. I wish he was alive, I could ask him that.

An early marriage faltered.

Mateen’s ex-wife, Sitora Yusufiy, told reporters she believed he suffered from mental illness.

Mateen, 29, was born in NY to Afghan immigrants described by one family friend as loving, close-knit and “very respectful” of America. “But 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 on who this guy is, what his motivations were and what his plans were”. These same reports say authorities are considering charging Mateen’s wife due to her knowledge of the situation.

Comey has also confirmed the Federal Bureau of Investigation spent 10 months investigating Mateen in 2013 and 2014.

He was married twice, and was the father of a 3-year-old boy.

The probe into Mateen came after he claimed to co-workers that he had “family connections to al-Qaida” and made statements that raised concerns about possible ties to terrorism.

When he left their home Saturday, hours before the shooting attack, Mateen lied about where he was going, she told investigators. Neighbors described him as a completely normal man, while gay men he met at Pulse said he was “strange”.

He said in an interview with Anderson Cooper: “He was very friendly when we said hi”.

He added that Mateen was clearly “radicalised”, at least in part via the internet.

The reports are a reminder of how little is known about Mateen’s background and motivations.