The wife of the gunman who killed 49 people at a nightclub in Orlando could face charges in connection with the attack, according to reports.
Prosecutors have convened a grand jury to investigate Noor Salman, wife of gunman Omar Mateen, sources quoted by Fox News and Reuters say.
She is reported to have told police she tried to talk her husband out of attacking the Pulse nightclub. The attack in Florida was the worst mass shooting in recent US history. Fifty-three people were wounded and six remain in a critical condition, BBC reported.
Prosecutors quoted by Fox News said they were seeking to charge Noor Salman as an accessory to 49 counts of murder and 53 counts of attempted murder, as well as with failure to warn authorities about the impending attack.
It was possible that Mateen had called his wife from inside the club while the killings were taking place, Fox quoted a source as saying.
Although Salman has been questioned since the attack early on Sunday, she has not been arrested.
US Senator Angus King, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee which received a briefing on the investigation, told CNN that “it appears she had some knowledge of what was going on”.
“She definitely is, I guess you would say, a person of interest right now and appears to be cooperating and can provide us with some important information,” he added.
On Tuesday, US media reported that Noor Salman had gone with Omar Mateen to buy ammunition and had also driven him to the Pulse nightclub on a previous occasion because he had wanted to survey it.
However, she said she had tried to talk her husband out of carrying out the attack, sources quoted by NBC News said.
Mateen’s father, Seddique Mateen, said on Tuesday that Salman—his son’s second wife—had returned to the couple’s flat on Monday to pick up some clothes. He said she and the couple’s young son were still in Florida but declined to say where.
Mateen, 29, who was killed when police stormed the club, pledged allegiance to self-styled Islamic State terrorist group during the attack, authorities say. He had visited the club as a guest several times over the past three years and interacted with other club goers on dating apps, witnesses said.
On Tuesday, President Barack Obama said Mateen appeared to have been “an angry, disturbed, unstable young man who became radicalized”.
Investigators have said there is no evidence that Mateen had been in contact with any outside groups such as IS. Mateen was a US citizen born in New York to Afghan immigrant parents.
President Obama will travel to the scene of the attack in Orlando on Thursday.
Obama Attacks Trump’s Muslim Ban Call
The Muslim ban proposed by Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump is “not the America we want”, President Barack Obama has said.
“Treating Muslim Americans differently will only make the country less safe by increasing division between the West and the Muslim world,” he added.
On Monday, Trump extended his ban plan to people from all countries with a terror history against the US. He said the deadly Orlando nightclub shootings justified such an action.
Trump said his proposal could be implemented through unilateral executive action, given the president’s power to “suspend entry into the country of any class of persons that the president deems detrimental to the interests or security of the United States”.
But on Tuesday at the US Treasury in Washington, a visibly angry Obama launched his strongest assault yet on the man who is expected to be confirmed as the Republican nominee next month.
The president said the US had been founded on freedom of religion and having a “religious test” would be against the US Constitution. He also noted that recent terror attacks in the US had been carried out by people born in the US.
Mateen was born in the same New York neighborhood as Trump.
The president also urged the US to reinstate the ban on assault weapons. And he dismissed Trump’s suggestion that he resign because he refuses to use the word “radical Islamic terrorism”.
“If we fall into the trap of painting all Muslims with a broad brush and imply that we are at war with an entire religion, then we are doing the terrorists’ work for them,” he said.
