Orlando, Florida - Family and friends of victims trapped in a gay nightclub by a gunman pledging loyalty to Islamic State waited anxiously on Monday to find out whether their loved ones were among the 50 people killed and 53 wounded in the deadliest mass shooting in US history.
The FBI and other law enforcement authorities were poring over evidence that could explain the motives for the rampage in Orlando, Florida, a massacre that President Barack Obama denounced as an act of terror and hate.
The gunman, Omar Mateen, a New York-born Florida resident and US citizen who was the son of Afghan immigrants, was shot and killed by police who stormed the club with armoured cars after a three-hour siege.
Mateen, 29, called emergency services during the shooting and pledged allegiance to the leader of the militant Islamic State group, officials said. His father said on Sunday his son was not radicalised, but indicated Mateen had strong anti-gay feelings. His ex-wife described him as mentally unstable and violent toward her.
The shooting began just after 2am on Sunday at the crowded Pulse nightclub in the heart of Orlando, about 25km north-east of the Walt Disney World Resort.
Some 350 patrons were attending a Latin music event at the club, a well-known gay nightspot in the city, and survivors described scenes of carnage and pandemonium as the shooter took hostages inside a bathroom. Nearly 24 hours after the rampage ended, authorities had publicly named only 21 of the victims, half of whom were in their 20s.
Family and friends waited for news outside a centre in Orlando where authorities were gathering details about people still missing.
Jaymie Glaspie, 35, was looking for her brother, Paul Henry.
“I've been calling all day, and I just went to his house,” Glaspie said. “It's just ringing and ringing.”
Maribel Mejia, 42, got good news about one friend, who sought cover during the shooting and escaped. Others were not as lucky.
“One is dead already,” Meijia told reporters. “Six more, we don't know.”
Gunman’s father asks ‘why’?
Mateen was an armed guard at a gated retirement community, and had worked for the global security firm G4S for nine years.
He had cleared two company background screenings, the latest in 2013, according to G4S..
Despite Mateen's 911 call expressing support for Islamic State, US officials said they had no conclusive evidence of any direct connection with foreign extremists.
“So far as we know at this time, his first direct contact was a pledge of bayat (loyalty) he made during the massacre,” said a US counterterrorism official.
“This guy appears to have been pretty screwed up without any help from anybody.”
Authorities said Mateen had been twice questioned by FBI agents in 2013 and 2014 after making comments to co-workers about supporting militant groups, but neither interview led to evidence of criminal activity
Ronald Hopper, the FBI's assistant special agent in charge on the case, said Mateen was questioned in 2014 about his contacts with Moner Mohammad Abu-Salha, a US citizen who also had lived in Florida and became a suicide bomber in Syria that year.
Mateen's former wife, Sitora Yusufiy, said he was emotionally and mentally disturbed, yet aspired to be a police officer.
Yusufiy told reporters near Boulder, Colorado, that she had been beaten by Mateen during outbursts of temper in which he would “express hatred towards everything.”
But his father Mir Siddique, who saw Mateen on Saturday afternoon, said he saw nothing out of the ordinary.
“Everything was normal,” Siddique told ABC News, saying his son was not radicalised. “He was just a regular person who went to work, coming back and take care of his wife and his kids,” he said. “If he was alive, I would ask him one question: why?”
In an interview with NBC news, the father described an incident in downtown Miami in which his son, saw two men kissing in front of his wife and child and became very angry.
Mateen and his family regularly attended a Florida mosque.
“Not everyone had a friendship with him. He wasn't a people person. He was not extremely friendly but he wasn't rude either,” said Mohammed Jameel, 54, a worshipper at the mosque.
Another worshipper said she recently saw Mateen dancing at his sister's wedding, a mixed affair that was open to both men and women.
Sunday night, federal agents combed through Mateen's apartment in the Atlantic coast town of Fort Pierce, about 190km southeast of Orlando, as numerous evidence vans sat parked outside.
“The FBI is currently in the apartment. They'll probably be there through the night,” said St Lucie County Sheriff Ken Mascara.
Homegrown attacks
The attack in Orlando came six months after a married couple in California - a US-born son of Pakistani immigrants and a Pakistani-born woman he married in Saudi Arabia - killed 14 people in San Bernardino in an shooting rampage inspired by Islamic State. The couple died in a shootout with police hours after that attack.
Obama was due to be briefed at the White House by his top national security officials including FBI Director James Comey at 10.30am ET (1430 GMT)
He said on Sunday the Orlando gunman's motivation was still unclear. “We know enough to say this was an act of terror, an act of hate,” he told reporters.
Obama also repeated his frustration over America's lax gun laws.
“This massacre is therefore a further reminder of how easy it is for someone to get their hands on a weapon that lets them shoot people in a school, or in a house of worship, or a movie theatre, or in a nightclub. And we have to decide if that's the kind of country we want to be,” Obama said.
The shooting reignited the debate not only over gun laws but also over national security and how best to confront Islamist militancy, in what is shaping up to be a vitriolic US presidential campaign between Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Donald Trump.
Trump, who has called for a temporary ban on Muslims entering the United States, said he was “right on radical Islamic terrorism” and called on Obama to resign because he did not say the words “radical Islam” in his statement responding to the shooting. He planned a speech on Monday about national security.
Clinton echoed Obama's comments calling the attack both an act of terror and a hate crime, adding that the massacre “reminds us once more that weapons of war have no place on our streets.”
The most deadly attack on US soil inspired by violent Islamist militancy was on September 11, 2001, when al-Qaeda-trained hijackers crashed jetliners into New York's World Trade centre, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania, killing about 3 000 people.
Reuters