Omar Mateen, the terrorist responsible for killing at least 50 people at the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, Florida early Sunday morning, allegedly attended the Islamic Center Fort Pierce for more than 13 years, despite Mateen’s ex-wife telling the Washington Post that Mateen “wasn’t very religious.”
CBS 12, the affiliate TV station near Fort St. Lucie, Florida where Mateen lived, spoke to the Islamic Center Fort Pierce Imam.
“I was shocked and I feel so bad for all the innocent, poor people who were killed and then it was a double, triple-fold tragedy for us that something happened and it had a link and a relationship to us, so I was much more in shock and in tragedy than anybody else,” the Imam told CBS 12 reporter Israel Balderas.
My message always to my congregation, to my children to everybody that I know, that we are […] in making our children religious, but draw … a line for them. Don’t make them too much religious that they become terrorists. When I see somebody particularly that I feel he talk like, I say. ‘Don’t be extremist!’
The report that Mateen attended the Islamic Center Fort Pierce for more than 13 years conflicts with Mateen’s ex-wife’s statements to the Washington Post on Sunday who had married Mateen in 2009:
“He seemed like a normal human being,” she said, adding that when they were married he wasn’t very religious and often worked out at the gym. She said in the few months they were married he gave no signs of having fallen under the sway of radical Islam.
Mateen was born in New York to parents of Afghan origin. He had been investigated by the FBI in 2014, but ultimately that investigation was closed, according to Fox News.