ORLANDO NIGHTCLUB gunman Authorities: Mosque fire may be a hate crime

Associated Press

FORT PIERCE, FLA.

The mosque that Orlando nightclub gunman Omar Mateen attended was heavily damaged in an arson that Muslim leaders said was the latest incident in an escalating campaign of harassment and violence against the house of worship and its members.

Given the timing – Sunday’s 15th anniversary of 9/11 and the start of the Muslim holiday Eid al-Adha – investigators believe the blaze that broke out shortly before midnight Sunday at the Islamic Center of Fort Pierce may have been a hate crime, St. Lucie County sheriff’s spokesman Maj. David Thompson said.

No one was injured. The fire burned a 10-by-10-foot hole in the roof at the back of the mosque’s main building and blackened its eaves with soot.

A surveillance video from the mosque showed a man on a motorcycle approaching the building with a bottle of liquid and some papers, then leaving when there was a flash and shaking his hand as though he may have burned it, Thompson said.

The arsonist “is terrorizing our community because we don’t know where he is at and we don’t know what he is capable of doing,” said Wilfredo Amr Ruiz, a Florida spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

Mateen was killed by police after opening fire at the Pulse nightclub June 12 in a rampage that left 49 victims dead and 53 wounded. He professed allegiance to the Islamic State group. His father is among roughly 100 people who attend the mosque.

Ruiz said the mosque and its worshippers have been harassed since the massacre.

“First there were threating voicemails,” he said. “Then drivers would splash water on the parishioners leaving on Fridays, and then a member got beat up in the parking lot when he came to the mosque for early morning prayers, and now the mosque has been set on fire.”

The mosque has received more threats since the nightclub shooting than it did in its previous 20 years of existence, assistant imam Hamaad Rahman said.