Police identify Florida nightclub shooting suspect


Police have identified Omar Saddiqui Mateen, an American-born citizen who lived in Port St. Lucie, Florida, as the suspect in Sunday's mass casualty shooting at Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando.
Mateen was "on the radar" of officials prior to the incident, though he was not subject to any active investigation. His parents were born in Afghanistan.
During the premeditated attack, Mateen was armed with multiple weapons, including "some kind of device" which has yet to be specified. After opening fire for several minutes, he created a hostage situation and died around 5 a.m. in a gunfight with police inside Pulse.
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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.
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