As San Bernardino and Orlando have demonstrated, we are not in safe hands. In an alarming admission of dangerous incompetence, Attorney General Loretta Lynch admitted this week that the FBI does not know the location of Noor Salman, the wife and possible accomplice of the radical Islamic mass murderer Omar Mateen.
Despite Salman being under investigation for her admitted foreknowledge of Mateen’s attack on a gay nightclub in Orlando, accompanying him as he cased other possible attack locations, including Disney, and being there while he bought the ammo he used to slaughter 49 innocent people, according to Lynch’s admission Tuesday, the FBI has lost her.
“I believe she was going to travel, but I do not know exactly her location now.”
Attorney General Loretta Lynch
Asked by a reporter if “the shooter’s wife left the state of Florida,” Lynch admitted she doesn’t know.
“Right now, I don’t know exactly the answer to that,” said the attorney general. “I believe she was going to travel, but I do not know exactly her location now.”
In another press conference this week, Lynch attempted to downplay the role radical Islam and ISIS played in the attack, describing the attack in the vaguest of terms as a act of “hate” — a rhetorical game the administration has played from the beginning. The “most effective” response to such an act, she said, was “love.” Vigilant and aggressive protection of American citizens apparently did not make the cut.
As The Daily Wire reported last week, according to Mateen’s Taliban-sympathizing Afghan refugeee father, Salman appears to have “vanished” after coming under investigation for what appears to be her complicity in the jihadist attack at the Pulse nightclub.
Hank Berrien provided the following summary of what we know about Salman, including that she was the daughter of Palestinian immigrants, admitted to accompanying Mateen as he planned his attack, and texted that she loved him while he was in the midst of shooting over a hundred people at Pulse:
1. Salman was born in San Pablo, in the Bay Area, to Palestinian immigrants. Marriage documents in the Contra Costa County Recorder’s office show her parents became naturalized citizens in 1984. She has three sisters.
2. Salman grew up in Rodeo, roughly 25 miles northeast of San Francisco, and graduated from John Swett High School in 2004.
3. Salman was married in an arranged marriage organized in the Palestinian territories before she knew Mateen.
4. She first met Mateen online when he was a security guard in central Florida. Their wedding took place in Hercules, in Contra Costa County, Calif., on Sept. 29, 2011. They have a 3-year-old son.
5. Once married to Mateen and living in Florida, she kept a low profile; Salman Bedar Bakht, 56, a Pakistani man who knew her from the local mosque in Fort Pierce, said, “She didn’t socialize with the masjid (mosque) people. She would not mingle with people in the mosque because that’s how her husband told her: not to socialize with the mosque women because they were too nosy. I think that was because he was already divorced and people were already talking. There were rumors that he had beaten his wife.”
6. Salman rarely visited her California home; she did go home around the time her father died in December 2012, according to neighbors.
7. Salman admitted to the FBI that she had accompanied her husband to Pulse nightclub at least once before the massacre. She also admitted she accompanied him when he bought ammunition.
8. Salman and Mateen texted each other during the massacre; she told him that she loved him while they were texting.