Lawyers for the widow of the Pulse nightclub shooter in Florida called for a mistrial Monday because they were just told that the attacker’s father was an FBI informant for 11 years, according to reports.
Noor Salman is accused of helping her husband, Omar Mateen, plan the June 12, 2016, attack on the gay club in Orlando, where he slaughtered 49 people and injured 68 others before being shot dead.
Her lawyers’ federal court motion filed Monday says prosecutors contacted them Saturday night and told them about Seddique Mateen’s relationship with the feds, the Orlando Sentinel reported.
“It is apparent from the Government’s belated disclosure that Ms. Salman has been defending a case without a complete set of facts and evidence that the Government was required to disclose,” attorney Fritz Scheller said in the court filing.
The motion was filed just hours before Salman’s lawyers were slated to begin presenting their case. The prosecution rested its case Thursday.
Seddique Mateen, who was on the government’s witness list, was never called to testify — though his wife, Shahla Mateen, did testify.
According to the new motion, the elder Mateen acted as an informant at various times between January 2005 and June 2016, the Orlando paper reported.
He also was investigated after agents assigned to the shooting found receipts for money transfers to Turkey and Afghanistan during the period between March 16, 2016, and June 5, 2016 — a week before the Pulse attack, according to the motion.
Had Salman’s defense attorneys known about those transfers, Scheller argued, they would have “investigated whether a tie existed between Seddique Mateen and his son, specifically whether Mateen’s father was involved in or had foreknowledge of the Pulse attack.”
That would be relevant to Salman’s defense, Scheller argued, because the government has claimed she helped her husband invent a cover story to tell his parents about where he was going the night prior to the mass shooting.
If Seddique Mateen had “some level of foreknowledge” about his son’s plot, a cover story “would have been completely unnecessary,” according to the motion.
According to the motion, CBS News reported, the defense also alleged that a decision not to give Salman a polygraph was possibly “based on the FBI’s desire to implicate Noor Salman, rather than Seddique Mateen in order to avoid scrutiny of its own ineptitude with the latter.”
Prosecutor Sara Sweeney disclosed the information about Seddique Mateen to the defense in an email Sunday. Salman’s attorneys said prosecutors violated an evidence disclosure law by not informing them sooner.
Salman, 31, is accused of obstruction of justice and aiding and abetting her husband’s providing material support to a foreign terrorism group.
Her attorneys have said they plan to tell jurors that Salman was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder because of Mateen’s domestic abuse.
Defense attorney Linda Moreno said in opening statements that Salman is a “trusting, simple” person who did not know she would be widowed because her husband became “a martyr for a cause that she didn’t support.”
Last week, US District Judge Paul Byron told jurors they could expect closing arguments on Wednesday, which means a verdict could come by the end of the week.