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Orlando Gunman Told Police That U.S. Should ‘Stop Bombing’ Syria and Iraq Orlando Police Defend Actions as Clock Ticked in Massacre
(about 4 hours later)
WASHINGTON — Omar Mateen, the gunman in this month’s massacre in an Orlando nightclub, told a crisis negotiator less than an hour after the attack began that the United States needed to “stop bombing Syria and Iraq” and he threatened more attacks in the coming days, according to a partial F.B.I. account released Monday morning. Some details of the Orlando nightclub massacre are known to the minute: The first reports of gunfire came at 2:02 a.m. The gunman made a 911 call at 2:35 a.m., in which he pledged allegiance to the Islamic State. By 5:15 a.m., as hostages fled to safety, he lay dead or mortally wounded in a scene of unimaginable carnage.
The original material put out by the F.B.I. omitted any mention of the Islamic State in Mr. Mateen’s conversations with law enforcement officials. But hours later, the F.B.I. released a fuller, unedited account of a 911 call from the Pulse nightclub after coming under harsh criticism, particularly from Republican leaders who accused the administration of censoring references to Islamic radicalism. Many questions persist about those three hours at the blood-drenched Pulse nightclub, and about how law enforcement handled the crisis on June 12. Orlando police officials have been peppered with queries from the public, survivors and the news media about whether they should have confronted the gunman sooner and whether any of the victims were shot by the police.
“I pledge allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi,” the leader of the Islamic State, Mr. Mateen told the 911 caller in Arabic in a phone call from inside the club at 2:35 on the morning of the June 12 attack, according to the F.B.I.’s unedited account of that phone call. “May God protect him, on behalf of the Islamic State.” The city’s police chief, John Mina, and other officials have repeatedly defended the delay in storming a bathroom where the gunman had taken hostages, and have deflected questions about whose bullets did what damage. On Monday, Chief Mina answered in a way that left open the possibility that some of the 49 people killed and 53 wounded were, in fact, hit by police gunfire.
In a joint statement, the F.B.I. and the Justice Department said the protests over the government’s initial decision to edit out parts of Mr. Mateen’s statements “caused unnecessary distraction from the hard work that the F.B.I. and our law enforcement partners have been doing to investigate this heinous crime,” and officials decided to reissue the transcript. “That’s part of the investigation, but here’s what I will tell you: Those killings are on the suspect,” he said.
Even so, the F.B.I. continued to withhold parts of later phone calls on the morning of the attack between the gunman and hostage rescue negotiators. The chief spoke at a news conference with local and federal law enforcement officials outside the club to release a partial transcript of the gunman’s conversations with the police during the siege, and to fill a few gaps in the official account of what took place. But the news conference seemed intended just as much to reject criticism of the police.
In the portions that were released, Mr. Mateen warned — falsely, it turned out — that there were bombs in a car outside the nightclub and explosives inside it, and that “you people are gonna get it, and I’m gonna ignite it if they try to do anything stupid.” In a series of calls between 2:35 and 3:24 a.m. during a standoff with the police, Mr. Mateen also spoke in Arabic and claimed responsibility “in the name of God the merciful,” and linked his attack to the terrorist attacks last year in and around Paris. “I think there was this misconception that we didn’t do anything for three hours, and that’s absolutely not true,” the chief said. He said the police had used the time to rescue patrons, get the lay of the building, put resources into place, determine where people were hiding and talk to the gunman.
At a news conference in Orlando, Ronald Hopper, an assistant agent in charge of the bureau’s Tampa Division, said the gunman had made 911 calls during the shooting in a “chilling, calm and deliberate manner.” Federal law enforcement officials at Monday’s news conference offered vigorous praise of local agencies and their personnel. “They should not be second-guessed,” said A. Lee Bentley III, the United States attorney for the Middle District of Florida. “Lives were saved because of their heroic work.”
Negotiators spoke to him for a total of 28 minutes over three calls, the F.B.I. said. The killer, Omar Mateen, spoke with the authorities four times for a total of 29 minutes while holding hostages in a bathroom where victims lay bleeding. The transcript released by the F.B.I. covered only the first, brief call and fragments of the last call; the substance of his statements was made public last week but not the precise language.
The F.B.I.’s account of the emergency calls included no mention by Mr. Mateen of any hatred of gays or a desire to attack a gay nightclub in particular; the bureau has been investigating the attack as a possible anti-gay hate crime, but the material released on Monday offers nothing to back up that theory. In the first call, to 911 at 2:35 a.m., which lasted less than a minute, Mr. Mateen, 29, took responsibility for the shootings “in the name of God the merciful,” and declared allegiance to the Islamic State and its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. He demanded that the United States halt its bombing in Syria and Iraq.
John Mina, Orlando’s police chief, addressed a question about whether any of the victims were hit by police bullets in the initial shootout with officers shortly after 2 a.m. The police have said that most of the 49 people killed and 53 wounded were shot in the first minutes of the rampage before Mr. Mateen holed up in a bathroom with hostages. He talked with a police negotiator at 2:48 for nine minutes, at 3:03 for 16 minutes and at 3:24 for three minutes. In the last call, he claimed — falsely, it turned out — to have explosives.
“That’s part of the investigation, but here’s what I will tell you: Those killings are on the suspect,” Chief Mina said. “There is some vehicle outside that has some bombs, just to let you know,” he said. “You people are gonna get it, and I’m gonna ignite it if they try to do anything stupid.” He said he had a vest of the kind “used in France,” an apparent reference to explosive vests used by Islamic State attackers in Paris in November.
It was the first time that the chief had answered the question in a way that left open the possibility that officers could have killed club patrons by accident. “While the killer made these murderous statements, he did so in a chilling, calm and deliberate manner,” said Ronald Hopper, an assistant special agent in charge of the F.B.I.’s office in Tampa, Fla.
In an interview, the SWAT commander, Mark Canty, said he doubted any fatalities resulted from police bullets. The F.B.I. at first released a transcript redacted to avoid mentioning the Islamic State and Mr. Baghdadi by name, which officials described as an effort not to play into the group’s propaganda. That drew ridicule in the news media and from some Republicans, led by Speaker Paul D. Ryan, who suggested the Obama administration was playing down the attacker’s radical Islamist motivation.
“I know my guys did the best they could,” he said. “They are trained to kind of identify the targets.” Hours later, the F.B.I. released what it said was an unedited transcript of the first 911 call, with the names.
The medical examiner, Dr. Joshua Stephany, said the autopsies did not make any determination as to who killed whom. The material released does not include any mention of a hatred of gays, which the bureau has been investigating as a possible motive.
A nearly three-hour standoff followed the shootout, which ended when law enforcement agencies stormed the building, killed the gunman and freed the hostages. Federal officials declined to release transcripts of all the calls, or of 911 calls made by people trapped inside Pulse, or audio recordings of any of them.
The F.B.I. released a timeline Monday that showed a half-hour passed from when Mr. Mateen warned of explosives to when the police stormed the building. The first calls about a shooting came at 2:02 a.m., according to a timeline released by the F.B.I. The timeline did not say whether Mr. Mateen exchanged gunfire with an off-duty officer working security, as some officials have said.
Mr. Canty said he arrived at about 2:45. “There was a lot of officers, a lot of chaos, the lights are out in the club, water on the floor,” he said. At 2:04, more officers arrived, and at 2:08, officers from multiple agencies entered the club, and they and Mr. Mateen opened fire.
According to the timeline, the first negotiation with the gunman began at 2:48 a.m. and lasted nine minutes. The second call, at 3:03 a.m., lasted 16 minutes; the third, at 3:24 a.m., three minutes. Mr. Canty said the police used the lull to assess the situation and save hostages. “That engagement and that initial entry caused him to stop shooting, retreat, and barricade himself into a bathroom,” Chief Mina said.
At 4:21 a.m., according to the timeline, police officers pulled an air-conditioning unit out of a dressing room wall to save eight people. Officials did not say how many officers fired in that gun battle, or how many rounds. The Orange County medical examiner, Dr. Joshua D. Stephany, said in an interview that autopsies of victims had not made any determination about who fired the fatal shots.
Eight minutes later, some victims relayed that Mr. Mateen was threatening to strap bombs to the hostages. About 32 minutes later, the SWAT team and the sheriff’s office bomb squad tried to break in. The chief said it took officers time to assemble the explosives to do so. In an interview, the SWAT commander, Mark Canty, said he doubted any fatalities resulted from police bullets. Members of his team, he said, “are trained to kind of identify the targets.”
At 5:14 a.m., officers breached the outer wall as shots were fired. Mr. Mateen stuck his head out of the breach and started firing, according to Mayor Buddy Dyer. Suddenly, Mr. Mateen fell backward in a hallway between the two bathrooms, he said. At 5:15 a.m.: Mr. Mateen was reported down. But it is not clear whether any officers in that gunfight were from the SWAT team, and it is clear that some were not. The full team was not called to the scene until 2:18.
“You saw the gunfire back and forth,” Mr. Dyer said. “You‘re hearing ‘shooters’ down’ or something like that.” From the time Mr. Mateen retreated to the bathroom, Chief Mina said, “There was no shooting in that three-hour period until the commencement of the hostage-rescue operation.”
Chief Mina and other officials vigorously defended the handling of the siege from criticism that they waited too long to go in, noting that throughout the lull, officers put themselves at great risk by going into the club to rescue people. Survivors who were in that bathroom have said Mr. Mateen had sprayed it with gunfire, killing and injuring several people, but their accounts did not make clear whether that happened before or after the firefight with the police. Former hostages agreed that a long period without shooting followed, though some have said Mr. Mateen shot a few more people at the end of the siege, after officers began to storm the building.
“I think there was this misconception that we didn’t do anything for three hours, and that’s absolutely not true,” he said. Officials here have insisted that the police followed protocol in not trying to force a showdown that could have claimed more lives. In fact, Mayor Buddy Dyer said the department’s practices called for officers to retreat 1,000 feet once there was a threat of explosives, but they did not.
The mayor added that protocol called for the officers to retreat 1,000 feet because of the possible presence of explosives, but none did. Chief Mina said that throughout the standoff, officers went into the club, putting themselves in danger to rescue people. Some survivors have told stories to that effect; Angel Colon, tearfully told of being unable to walk after having been shot several times, and expressed gratitude to an officer who pulled him to safety.
The chief said that no shots were fired from the time Mr. Mateen retreated to a bathroom until the police began their assault. People who were trapped in that bathroom have said that the killer did shoot a few people after officers began using explosives and an armored vehicle to breach the outer wall of the building. But others who escaped with their lives have not been so complimentary. Norman Caisano said that after hiding and then making his way toward the club entrance, “I poked my head out, and the police actually shot at me.”
The F.B.I. made public only partial transcripts of Mr. Mateen’s calls on Monday, and none of the audio recordings. Though officials and shooting survivors have said publicly that in the calls, the gunman pledged his allegiance to the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, and its leader, the F.B.I. redacted those statements from the transcript, along with parts of the conversation in which Mr. Mateen voiced support for other extremist ideologies. “I started crying and yelling, ‘I’m a victim, I’m a victim, please, I’m hurt, I’m injured, I’ve been shot twice,’ ” he said.
But that decision opened up department officials to charges that they are playing down elements of radical Islamist beliefs in the attack — a politically charged issue that Donald J. Trump and other Republicans have seized upon. Jeannette McCoy, 37, who escaped early on, was furious at the caution of the police, yelling at them to end the matter. “I wanted this guy dead,” she said, but “they gave him so much time.”
“Selectively editing this transcript is preposterous,” House Speaker Paul D. Ryan said in a statement. “We know the shooter was a radical Islamist extremist inspired by ISIS. We also know he intentionally targeted the L.G.B.T. community. The administration should release the full, unredacted transcript so the public is cleareyed about who did this, and why.” At 4:21 a.m., officers pulled an air-conditioner out of a wall, creating an escape route for people hiding in one room of the club. Eight minutes later, according to the F.B.I. timeline, some people who been inside had told the police that the gunman had said he was going to put explosive vests on four hostages within 15 minutes.
Gov. Rick Scott of Florida, a Republican who has frequently criticized the Obama administration, said on Fox News that the limited release “doesn’t make any sense to me.” That prompted the decision to storm the club, officials have said. While the gunman and his hostages were in one bathroom, officials decided to breach the building’s outer wall at another bathroom nearby, to free people trapped there, and make a path in.
“This is another example of not focusing on the evil here,” Mr. Scott added. A team from the Orange County Sheriff’s Office placed explosives on the wall. Those were detonated at 5:02 a.m., but did not break all the way through, so officers used an armored vehicle to punch through the wall. But officials have said their aim was off, and they had to try multiple times to find the right spot for a hole. At 5:14 a.m., there were gunshots, as officers traded fire with Mr. Mateen. At 5:15, word came across the radio: the suspect was down.
Agent Hopper said: “Part of the redacting is meant to not give credence to individuals who’ve done terrorist acts in the past. We’re not going to propagate their rhetoric, their violent rhetoric, and we see no value in putting those individuals’ names back out there.” The F.B.I. said it had collected more than 600 pieces of evidence and conducted more than 500 interviews. One of those interviewed, Mohammad Malik, said that Mr. Mateen, a longtime friend, told him two years ago that he had listened to recordings of Anwar al-Awlaki, the radical American-born cleric who was killed in an American drone strike in Yemen. Mr. Malik told a reporter that he told the F.B.I. at the time, and the bureau investigated but did not bring charges. The F.B.I. has said it looked into Mr. Mateen in 2014.
Justice Department officials said that they feared survivors could be harmed if they had to hear Mr. Mateen’s rants anew. Investigators continue to believe that Mr. Mateen acted on his own, inspired by extremist groups but not directly in contact with them. They are still looking into what his wife knew, to determine whether she should face charges.
Agent Hopper said the F.B.I. would not release recordings of 911 calls from terrified people inside the club, including some who had been seriously wounded. “To expose that now would be excruciatingly painful to exploit them in that way,” he said. Agent Hopper appealed for the public’s patience with a case so complex that agents were still combing the crime scene.
The partial transcript adds another layer of detail to the horrific events of that morning, as F.B.I. counterterrorism investigators and the local authorities in Orlando continue to try to piece together the gunman’s motivations and examine any help he may have received. “This investigation is one week and one day old,” he said, “and it may last months, and even years.”
Attorney General Loretta Lynch will visit Orlando on Tuesday to meet with the investigators.
The F.B.I. has interviewed Mr. Mateen’s wife, Noor Zahi Salman, at length to determine whether she will face charges in the case. She has acknowledged that she suspected her husband might be planning an attack and was with him when he went to buy ammunition and visited the Pulse nightclub beforehand, but she has insisted to investigators that she tried to talk him out of doing anything, officials said.
Investigators continue to believe that Mr. Mateen was a “lone wolf” attacker who was apparently inspired by the ideologies of the Islamic State and other terrorist groups but was not directly in contact with any of them.
“We currently have no evidence that he was connected to an Islamic terrorist group, but radicalized domestically,” Agent Hopper said at the news conference.
He appealed for patience with an investigation so complex that agents still have not finished processing the crime scene. They have collected more than 600 pieces of evidence, conducted more than 500 interviews, and received thousands of tips about Mr. Mateen, he said. The medical examiner said Monday that it had released Mr. Mateen’s body, but offered not other details.
“This investigation is one week and one day old,” Agent Hopper said, “and it may last months and even years.”