Pulse Nightclub Shooter Planned to Target Disney, Was Spooked by Cops and Shot Up Nightclub Instead
2 years later and the truth is slowly trickling out
The trial of Noor Salman, widow of the Pulse nightclub shooter Omar Mateen, has made public a handful of startling revelations. Salman is accused of aiding late her husband who murdered 49 people. She’s also, “charged with obstruction and providing material support to a terrorist organization.”
Mateen pledged allegiance to ISIS and was killed by police after the attack. The incident was used by anti-gun activists to push for more gun control.
First, it was disclosed that Mateen’s father had worked as an FBI informant from 2005 to 2016. As a result, Salman’s attorneys requested a mistrial that was denied.
Wednesday, it was revealed that contrary to previous reporting, Mateen had not intentionally selected the gay nightclub as a theater for mass murder, but sought a Plan B after cops spooked him away from his original target — Disney World. Put in other terms, Mateen was deterred by armed guards and so headed for a gun-free zone.
According to NBC News, Mateen hid a gun in a stroller and planned to shoot up Disney World’s shopping and entertainment complex.
Sweeney said Salman didn’t know that Mateen was going to the Pulse nightclub on the night of the attack — she thought he was at Disney World. They two had visited Disney in the days before the attack, according to one of her statements to federal authorities.
“The target of that terrorist attack was not the Pulse nightclub,” Sweeney said. “The target of the attack was Disney.”
Sweeney showed a video of the Disney Springs complex that captured Mateen walking near the House of Blues club in the hours before the Pulse attack. In it, he looks behind him at police officers standing nearby.
“He had to choose a new target,” she said.
…Sweeney also said that Mateen had bought a baby stroller and doll at Walmart on June 11 — the day before the attack — and had a plan to hide a gun in the stroller while going to Disney.
As for Salman’s case, the accusations that she mislead federal authorities include:
Sweeney said Salman “knowingly engaged in misleading conduct” when she spoke to the FBI in the hours after the attack.
Prosecutors said she claimed her husband didn’t use the internet in their home, but he did. She also told investigators that Mateen had deactivated his Facebook account in 2013, but investigators found that he had an account up until the month of the shooting and was friends with his wife. She said her husband only had one gun when he had three, and that he wasn’t radicalized even though prosecutors said he spent time watching beheading videos and looking at ISIS sites.
Salman’s trial concluded Wednesday and the jury is still in deliberations:
Jurors deliberating in the trial of the Orlando nightclub shooter’s wife have examined a statement that she made to the FBI in the hours after the attack that killed 49 people in 2016.
The jury asked to review the statement a couple of hours into their discussions in the trial of Noor Salman. They will resume deliberations at 9 a.m. Thursday.
Her attorneys fought to keep the statement out of the trial. They say it was coerced and she signed it because she was tired and feared losing her young son.
Prosecutors say it showed she knew about the attack and did nothing to stop it.
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Comments
IMO- Disney world is not a soft target. They’ve thought about security, it shows ….and a lot of it doesn’t show (which is good).
TSA could take a lesson from them.
Andy, you are spot on.
BTW, this again raises more than one question: Why are the anti-2nd amendment clowns (including biden, who just came out) still ignoring the fact that a reported 64% of mass killers are mentally ill (thanks, liberals, for refusing to institutionalize them), and why are lefties still defending the wholesale importation of cowardly jihadists?
Good guys with guns always turn cowardly murderers to soft targets.
When I would think that a terrorist attack at a major theme park would be one of the situations that keeps people who have to think about that kind of stuff up at night.
Because terror works to the benefit of those who want government to grow.
Because, at its root, gun control has nothing to do with public safety. Its purpose is to empower socialist government by leaving the public with no practical recourse against anything they wish to force on people.
The basic tenet of socialism is the abolition of private property, once government is strong enough to do it. See the confiscation of businesses, homes, farms, etc. in Russia in the 1920s and 30s, or more recently in Cuba, Venezuela, etc. — an armed people would never allow it.
How long does it take for the self-declared “party of science” to get it through their thick skulls? Mass murderers choose “gun free zones” because they know that they can kill longer. Psychiatrists/psychologists who study the criminal mind can tell you this.
Because, hell, the mass murderers who survive their killing spree and end up in prison will tell you this.
Next in totally unexpected news: robbers target the elderly because they’re more likely to have built up wealth and now that they’re elderly they are less likely to be able to fight back.
Also in totally unexpected news, the sun rises in the east and sets in the west.
Wasn’t Mateen transgender, not homosexual, bur bisexual, who was jilted by the transgender community? A social outcast, like the shooter in Florida.
That’s not really the point. So what if he was? Chattanooga shooter Mohammad Abdulazeez shooter was apparently a drug addict. There’s really only one way for people like this, who have led sinful lives per the tenets of Islam, to attain Jenna, Islamic paradise, and get right with Allah.
Surah 9:111
“Indeed, Allah has purchased from the believers their lives and their properties [in exchange] for that THEY WILL HAVE PARADISE. They fight in the cause of Allah, so THEY KILL AND ARE KILLED. [It is] a true promise [binding] upon Him in the Torah and the Gospel and the Qur’an. And who is truer to his covenant than Allah ? So rejoice in your transaction which you have contracted. And it is that which is the great attainment.”
According to the tenets of Islam, if your good deeds outweigh your bad deeds you go to heaven. If your bad deeds outweigh your good deeds you go to hell. If you were born a Muslim but have live an unforgivably sinful, western lifestyle, you have only one way to guarantee you won’t go to hell.
Guess what that is?
It’s insane how our media refuses to comprehend that simple fact. They’s say, “This guy couldn’t have been an Islamic terrorist; he owned a bar in Brussels and smoked dope.”
That’s exactly the point. He returned to the fold, but his Allah and Allah’s prophet also told him there’s no way he could be a Muslim. Except if…
“Put in other terms, Mateen was deterred by armed guards and so headed for a gun-free zone.”
No…can’t be I mean the enlightened teens under the preview of Boss Hogg said so! sarc/off
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun or the possibility of a good guy with a gun. Just more proof that these cowards choose targets where they are pretty sure they won’t catch a bullet before they can get their micro penis rage on.
“How long does it take for the self-declared “party of science” to get it”
The goal is Moar Marxism.
If (fake) science promotes Marxism by redistribution of energy output and consumption to prevent climate change, Science is embraced.
If science hinders Marxism by preventing the confiscation of firearms from the proles, Science is rejected.
It sounds like Mrs. Salman tried to say anything and everything to assuage the FBI, including confessing to things her attorneys can disprove with tracking data. The inaccuracies would seem to be on both ends of the ledger.
Does that fit the charges?
I wish they would fry the muslim witch.
If true, this means it was not, or at least not primarily, an anti-gay attack, but an anti-American one, and the choice of target was more random than planned.
I always thought it a bit odd that some were alleging he was (at least) bi-sexual and some claimed that he selected the night club as his target because he hated gays.
I’m with JB above. She’s on trial because she lied about his FB account and said he had 1 gun when he had 3? WTF? Sounds more like the Feds, etc want to silence her. Her FIL being an informant is interesting and I remember Matten himself being on the FBI radar. I wonder if she knows some Fed dropped the ball again, or maybe groomed him for an attack like those nuts in TX that attacked Pam Geller?
Yeah, it’s rather ironic in hindsight that I was downvoted for what I thought was a very good question. It sounds like she was spinning tales to minimize. I hadn’t heard that part before. I had heard the part about her tales to maximize after the agent questioning her came back and said to the effect of, (and this is based on his public testimony) “We know you’re lying. Tell us what we want to know or you will never see your children again.” So she tried telling them “what they wanted to know”, things that incriminated herself, thinking that if she came clean, she’d be all right. Even about things that she hadn’t even done.
Sounds like she was in a complete panic, a classic case of what goes wrong when you enter these kinds of interviews without an attorney. The problem, as hindsight has proven, is what a jury thinks of all this.
I’m with JB above. She’s on trial because she lied about his FB account and said he had 1 gun when he had 3? WTF? Sounds more like the Feds, etc want to silence her. Her FIL being an informant is interesting and I remember Matten himself being on the FBI radar. I wonder if she knows some Fed dropped the ball again, or maybe groomed him for an attack like those nuts in TX that attacked Pam Geller?
Well, apparently the jury did not believe that Noor had enough knowledge of her husband’s activities to knowingly mislead the FBI or that he was raising money for terrorist causes.
Apparently the state didn’t have a very strong case here.
The prosecution’s main witness against Noor Salman was Noor Salman. From what I could tell at a distance, impeaching the credibility of the main witness was not particularly difficult for the defense. Clearly she wasn’t telling the truth, but I can understand why a jury of her peers had difficulty believing it was due to her being a shadowy super-criminal spinning a thousand lives to throw the FBI off the trail – when she ended up throwing the FBI onto herself. Other posters have mentioned previous stories that called attention to these… issues. I read one such story and had a very bad feeling about the case from that point onward.
Since a jury found her not guilty, can she be deported? Travesty of justice – she deserved the death penalty.
She was born in California. How are you going to accomplish that trick?