Father of Orlando shooter hosted political show on Afghan-Pakistan issues

Reuters: The Afghan-born father of Omar Mateen, the man police identified as the gunman who killed 50 people at a packed gay nightclub in Florida on Sunday, hosted a political show on an U.S.-based Afghan satellite channel that took a hard anti-Pakistan line.

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In an interview with NBC News on Sunday, Seddique Mateen, also known as Mir Siddique, said his son’s rampage had “nothing to do with religion.”

He described an incident in downtown Miami in which his son saw two men kissing in front of his wife and child and he became very angry.

“We are saying we are apologizing for the whole incident,” NBC News quoted him as saying. “We weren’t aware of any action he is taking. We are in shock like the whole country.”

Seddique Mateen lives in Florida, according to public records, but it was not immediately known when came to the United States. He did not immediately return messages left on his phone, which appeared to be turned off, or respond to an email.

Omar Khatab, the owner of the California-based satellite channel Payam-e-Afghan, said in an interview that Seddique Mateen occasionally bought time on his channel to broadcast a show called “Durand Jirga,” which focused in part on the disputed Durand Line, the frontier between Afghanistan and Pakistan demarcated by the Indian subcontinent’s former British rulers.

“Three or four times a year, he would show up in Southern California,” Khatab said in a phone interview on Sunday. “He’d talk for about two to three hours. He’d buy his own time and come here and broadcast and leave within a day.”

Khatab said Seddique Mateen’s political views were largely anti-Pakistan.

One of Seddique Mateen’s videos refers to the “killer ISI” – the acronym for Pakistan’s main military-run intelligence service – and says the agency is the “creator and father of the world’s terrorism.”

U.S. officials have accused Pakistani intelligence of backing violence against U.S. targets in Afghanistan, although Pakistan denies the allegations.

A U.S. congressman said Omar Mateen, a 29-year-old Florida resident and U.S. citizen, may have pledged allegiance to the Islamic State militant group.

U.S. officials cautioned that they had no immediate evidence of any direct connection with Islamic State or other foreign extremist group, nor had they uncovered any contacts between the gunman and any such group.

Fifty-three people were wounded in the rampage. It was the deadliest single U.S. mass shooting incident, eclipsing the 2007 massacre of 32 people at Virginia Tech university.

Seddique Mateen interviewed Afghan President Ashraf Ghani in January 2014, according to a video posted on his YouTube channel. The interview touched on economic development and youth unemployment in Afghanistan. Khatab said Mateen conducted the interview in Kabul and brought it to California for broadcast.

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The connections are deeper, they include an American suicide bomber that the Orlando shooter Omar met with face to face. Then there is al Nusra and the Khorasan Group. The suicide bomber was Abusalha and his father is a Palestinian. Read the whole story here.

Omar Mateen had been investigated by the FBI twice before, in 2013 and then in 2014. The first investigation took place in 2013 when he made inflammatory comments to co-workers that indicated sympathy for terrorists. He was investigated and interviewed twice but the FBI was “unable to verify the substance of his comments,” FBI Assistant Special Agent In charge Ronald Hopper said.

Then in 2014, Hopper said,Mateen was investigated and interviewed again, this time for suspected connections to Moner Mohammad Abu-Salha, an American citizen who became a suicide bomber in Syria in 2014. Hooper said Mateen’s contact with Abu-Sallah  was minimal and it was deemed that “he did not constitute a substantive threat at that time.

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FNC: The gunman who murdered at least 50 people in a Florida nightclub early Sunday morning was a follower of a controversial gang leader-turned-bank robber who was released from prison last year despite warnings from prosecutors that he would recruit people to carry out violent acts, sources told FoxNews.com.

Omar Mateen, whose bloody siege inside a packed Orlando gay nightclub ended when SWAT teams stormed the building and killed him, was a radical Muslim who followed Marcus Dwayne Robertson, a law enforcement source said.

Marcus Dwayne Robertson, a former U.S. Marine known to his supporters at his Orlando-based Fundamental Islamic Knowledge Seminary as “Abu Taubah.”

“It is no coincidence that this happened in Orlando,” said a law enforcement source familiar with Robertson’s history of recruiting terrorists and inciting violence. “Mateen was enrolled in [Robertson’s online] Fundamental Islamic Knowledge Seminary.”

Robertson and several associates were rounded up for questioning early Sunday, according to law enforcement sources, a development his attorney refused to confirm or deny.

“No comment,” Corey Cohen said in an email reply when asked if his longtime client was in custody. Police also did not confirm or deny picking up Robertson.

This undated image provided by the Orlando Police Department shows Omar Mateen, the shooting suspect at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Fla., Sunday, June 12, 2016. The gunman opened fire inside the crowded gay nightclub early Sunday before dying in a gunfight with SWAT officers, police said. (Orlando Police Department via AP) (The Associated Press)

FoxNews.com has reported extensively on Robertson, a former U.S. Marine who served as a bodyguard to the Blind Sheik involved in the 1993 World Trade Center Attack and led a gang of New York bank robbers called “Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves” before resurfacing in Orlando, where he started an Islamic seminary.

The school, recently renamed the Timbuktu Seminary, is operated by Robertson, a 47-year-old firebrand known to his thousands of followers as Abu Taubah.

Robertson, who recently spent four years in prison in Florida on illegal weapons and tax fraud charges before being released by a Florida judge one year ago, has openly and enthusiastically preached against homosexuality. The targets of Mateen’s bloody rampage were members of the gay community of Orlando, an hour’s drive from the 29-year-old’s home in Fort Pierce.

Prosecutors said wiretaps from 2011 proved Robertson instructed one of his students, Jonathan Paul Jimenez, to file false tax returns to obtain a tax refund to pay for travel to Mauritania for terror training.

Jimenez studied with Robertson for a year in preparation for his travel to Mauritania, where he would study and further his training in killing, suicide bombing, and identifying and murdering U.S. military personnel. He pleaded guilty in 2012 to lying to authorities and conspiring to defraud the IRS and was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison.

Robertson was arrested on a firearms charge in 2011 and pleaded guilty in January 2012. On March 14, 2012, federal authorities charged him with conspiring to defraud the IRS, which he was convicted of in December 2013.

While in the John E. Polk Correctional Facility in Seminole County, Robertson was considered so dangerous, he was kept in shackles and assigned his own guards. Whenever he was transported to court, a seven-car caravan of armed federal marshals escorted him. He was initially moved into solitary confinement after prison authorities believed he was radicalizing up to 36 of his fellow prisoners.

In seeking enhanced terrorism charges during sentencing for the two crimes, prosecutors said Robertson has been involved with terrorism activities, “…focused on training others to commit violent acts as opposed to committing them himself” … “overseas instead of inside the United States.”

Yet efforts by federal prosecutors to tack on another 10 years to his sentence, based on enhanced terrorism charges under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, were not persuasive enough for U.S. District Judge Gregory Presnell, who freed Robertson in June 2015 with time served.

Robertson had denied being involved with terrorist activities, in court and in postings on social media and in statements from his attorney to Fox News.

Federal law enforcement has been familiar with Robertson since 1991.

As a former U.S. Marine who became the leader known as “Ali Baba” of a notorious New York gang “Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves”, Robertson and his crew robbed more than 10 banks, private homes and post offices at gunpoint, shot three police officers, and attacked one cop after he was injured by a homemade pipe bomb.

During the same period, federal authorities claimed Robertson served as a bodyguard to Omar Abdel Rahman, nicknamed the “Blind Sheik,” who led the terrorist group that carried out the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center and donated more than $300,000 in stolen funds to mosques he attended, both claims Robertson denied. Robertson has adamantly denied the claims.

After he was arrested in 1991 along with most of the other members of the gang, prosecutors cut a deal with Robertson, and let him serve four years in prison before going to work undercover for the FBI between 2004 and 2007 to document terrorists’ plans and networks in Africa, Egypt and the United States.

Many of the court’s filings, including Robertson’s own testimony from his most recent criminal case, remain under federal seal, which means only prosecutors, the judge and the defense can review the records.

Cohen told FoxNews.com in a statement that his client “never taught or condoned violence in any way.”

“In fact for his federal case the judge did not find terrorist acts, which led to his sentence of time served,” Cohen sai