omar Mateen, the Orlando gunman, was investigated by the FBI for ten months after he alarmed co-workers in 2013 by claiming to be a member of Hizbollah and have family ties to al-Qaeda.
James Comey, the FBI director, said the agency interviewed Mateen, sent in undercover agents and trailed him during the course of a ten month investigation.
Mateen admitted at the time that he had told colleagues he was affiliated with the terrorist groups, but said he only made the comments "in anger" because he felt persecuted for being Muslim.
He was again investigated in 2014 after being linked to a man who became a suicide bomber in Syria. The men attended the same mosque and knew each other, but the FBI determined that they had no significant relationship.
The 29-year-old American citizen whose parents had immigrated from Afghanistan, had been in regular communication with Moner Mohammed Abu Salha, a fellow Floridian who was a member of al-Qaeda-linked Jabhat al-Nusra.
In early 2014, Mateen was put under surveillance for possible ties with Abu Salha, the son of a Palestinian father and American mother who left his home state to join jihadists in Syria.
Salha, 22, was trained by Nusra in 2012 before returning to Florida in 2014, when it is believed he met with Mateen.
He returned to Syria several weeks later and released a so-called martyrdom video before his suicide mission in which he ripped up his US passport and called on fellow Americans to join the war.
The two were from the same town and prayed at the same mosque, the Islamic Centre of Fort Pierce.
The FBI case was dropped however, as Ron Hopper, head of the FBI in Orlando, said his office determined that Mateen's contact with Abu Salha "was minimal and did not constitute a substantive relationship or threat at that time".
Mateen also had connections with a former US Marine and undercover FBI agent turned radical Muslim cleric who was released from prison last year.
Marcus Dwayne Robertson, known as Abu Taubah to his follower, managed to convert 36 people during time in prison for arms offences. Mateen was a member of the Timbuktu Seminary, an educational website run by Robertson that police believe is used to dispense his radical teachings, according to Fox News.
Mateen was placed on the FBI’s terror watch list for the duration of the first investigation but never arrested.
Meanwhile, he continued to work for G4S, the British security company which hired him in 2007, and legally carry guns.
There were no shortage of red flags, according to a former co-worker who described Mateen as racist, sexist, homophobic and frighteningly aggressive saying, "I'm not surprised at what he did".
Daniel Gilroy, the former colleague, said Mateen was "unhinged"
"Everything he said was toxic and the company wouldn't do anything," Mr Gilroy told Florida Today. "This guy was unhinged and unstable. He talked of killing people."
John Kenning, the G4S regional chief executive for North America, said a company screening and background check in 2013 raised “nothing of concern”, though the company was aware that he had been questioned by the FBI and that “the inquiries were subsequently closed”.
The company did not offer a response when asked whether the concerns of Mateen’s co-workers had ever reached management.
Because he did not have a criminal record, Mateen passed the annual checks required to renew the firearms licence he needed to work as a security officer.
He was also able to purchase an AR-15 style assault rifle and another gun legally just 12 days before carrying out the attack.
Dave Joly, the FBI’s terrorist screening centre spokesperson, said the inclusion of someone on the terror watch list was kept confidential so as not to “impair the government's ability to investigate and counteract terrorism”.
That policy also meant that members of Mateen’s community were not alerted that the FBI considered him a possible threat.
Syed Rahman, the imam at Mateen’s mosque, said it “would have been helpful” to know that he might have been radicalised.
"He was working security, he was working for the police department, so we assumed there was a background check. Why would we think anything like that? We were thinking that he might be a safety factor for us," he said.
Dr Rahman said there were “rumours here and there that he was very aggressive”, but Mateen had been unusually quiet in recent years, and did not have a single close friend at the mosque.
Shortly after the shooting at Pulse nightclub in Orlando began, Mateen called 911 and pledged allegiance to Isil. In his final call, he also mentioned the Tsarnaev brothers, who executed the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013.
Seddique Mir Mateen, the gunman’s father, told reporters that if he had known his son was going to carry out an attack, “I would have arrested him myself”.
He has insisted that his son was not radicalised. “I don’t know what made him (do this), I have no idea,” he said in a three-minute clip posted on Facebook on Sunday night. “I had no idea that he felt resentful in his heart and had gone to the gay club and killed men and women there.”
However, he then went on to say that his son should not have carried out the killings because “Allah himself will punish those involved in homosexuality, not his servants on earth”.
Mr Mateen Snr, who moved to America sometime during the Soviet-Afghan war, is a minor celebrity in Afghan political circles in the US, hosting an occasional television show in which he expresses hardline views. In some of the videos, posted on YouTube, he expresses support for the Afghan Taliban, who he describes as "our warrior brothers".
After watching the videos, Ahmad Mukhtar, an Afghan commentator, said it seemed possible that Mr Mateen is delusional. "He thinks he runs a government in exile and will soon take the power in Kabul in a revolution," he noted.
Mr Mateen Snr, who is politically active and regularly writes open letters to President Barack Obama, had also posted pictures of himself outside the US state department and Congress during a visit to Washington DC in April.
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