June 14, 2016 | Business Insider

The FBI director painted a bizarre picture of the man behind the worst mass shooting in US history

The director of the FBI, James Comey, said Monday that Omar Mateen, the man who carried out the worst shooting in US history at a gay nightclub in Orlando, mentioned links to al-Qaida, Hezbollah, and the Islamic State – all within a three-year span.

“We first became aware of him in 2013, while he was working as a security guard at a local courthouse,” Comey told reporters Monday. “He made inflammatory and contradictory statements about terrorism that raised concern with his coworkers, and claimed family connections to al-Qaida.”

But Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a counterterrorism analyst and senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told Business Insider that it's not all that unusual for a jihadist at Mateen's level to have conflicting sympathies for different terror groups.

“ISIS, of course, was once part of the al-Qaida network,” Gartenstein-Ross said. “When that was the case, there wasn't the distinction between ISIS and al-Qaida. If you go back a few years, they were not competitor organizations.”

“On a foot-soldier level, you actually get less hostility toward other militant groups,” Gartenstein-Ross said. “Foot soldiers are just less wrapped up in the competition.”

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Topics:

Topics:

al-Qaeda Federal Bureau of Investigation Hezbollah Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant United States