FBI: No proof Orlando shooter was gay

Pulse night club entertainment manager Neema Bahrami (right) holds up a card made for him by children in honor of the Orlando shooting victims as club owner Barbara Poma listens Friday during a gay pride rally in New York.
Pulse night club entertainment manager Neema Bahrami (right) holds up a card made for him by children in honor of the Orlando shooting victims as club owner Barbara Poma listens Friday during a gay pride rally in New York.

WASHINGTON -- FBI investigators so far have not turned up persuasive evidence that Orlando gunman Omar Mateen was gay or pursuing gay relationships, according to two government officials familiar with the investigation.

The FBI began looking into that possibility after media reports last week quoted men saying Mateen had reached out to them on gay dating apps and had frequented the nightclub where the June 12 massacre took place. One man claimed to be Mateen's gay lover in an interview with Univision that aired this week, and another recalled Mateen as a regular at the Pulse club who tried to pick up men.

But the officials say the FBI, which has conducted 500 interviews, has recovered Mateen's phone and is reviewing evidence from it, has not found concrete evidence to corroborate such accounts nearly two weeks into the investigation. They also cautioned that the investigation is ongoing.

The officials were not authorized to discuss an ongoing investigation and spoke on condition of anonymity.

Law enforcement officials have said there is no doubt that Mateen was radicalized at some point before the Pulse nightclub attack, though there is no evidence that he was directed by any foreign terror groups.

In calls with the police after the shooting began, he pledged his allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State, and demanded that the United States stop bombing Syria and Iraq, the FBI said.

"I let you know, I'm in Orlando and I did the shootings," he said, according to a partial transcript made public by the FBI on Monday.

Attorney General Loretta Lynch has not described radical extremism as his sole motivation and declined in an interview on Tuesday to rule out any other possibility, including that he was secretly gay. She also declined to say what evidence, if any, existed to support alternate theories but said investigators remain focused on why he picked a gay nightclub as the target of his attack.

In the interview and in later remarks to reporters, Lynch called the attack that killed 49 people an act of both terror and hate.

"While we know a lot more about him in terms of who he was and what he did, I do not want to definitively rule out any particular motivation here," she said.

Mateen had a wife who has been extensively interviewed by federal investigators. He also had a 3-year-old son.

Jim Van Horn, 71, who said in the days after the attack that he recognized Mateen from previous visits to Pulse, said Friday that he wasn't sure why investigators wouldn't have discovered persuasive evidence of that, though he said he had no concrete evidence himself. He said he has not spoken with investigators and that they have not reached out to him.

Meanwhile, mourners were remembering the youngest of Mateen's 49 victims.

Funeral services were held Friday in Philadelphia for 18-year-old Akyra Murray. A single red rose was pinned inside the roof of her white coffin. Members of the high school basketball team Murray played on came in their jerseys.

Murray graduated a week before her family's vacation in Orlando and was to attend college this fall.

Information for this article was contributed by Allen Breed of The Associated Press.

A Section on 06/25/2016

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