The wife of the gunman who killed 49 people at an Orlando gay nightclub knew of his plans for the attack and could soon be charged in connection with the deadliest mass shooting in modern US history, a law enforcement source says.
The source told Reuters on Tuesday that a federal grand jury had been convened and could charge Omar Mateen's wife, Noor Salman, as early as Wednesday.
"It appears she had some knowledge of what was going on," said US Senator Angus King, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which received a briefing on the attack on Tuesday.
"She definitely is, I guess you would say, a person of interest right now and appears to be co-operating and can provide us with some important information," King told CNN.
FoxNews.com, citing an FBI source, said prosecutors were seeking to charge Mateen's wife as an accessory to 49 counts of murder and 53 counts of attempted murder, and failure to notify law enforcement about the pending attack and lying to federal agents.
NBC News said Salman told federal agents she tried to talk her husband out of carrying out the attack. But she also told the FBI she once drove him to the Pulse nightclub because he wanted to scope it out, the network said.
Salman's mother, Ekbal Zahi Salman, lives in a middle-class neighbourhood of the suburban town of Rodeo, California. A neighbour said Noor Salman only visited her mother once after she married Mateen.
Noor Salman's mother "didn't like him very much. He didn't allow her (Noor) to come here," said neighbour Rajinder Chahal.
He said he had spoken to Noor Salman's mother after the Orlando attack. "She was crying, weeping."
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