Getty/ID Mohammed Alshamrani held a mass shooting video dinner party, according to the Associated Press.
The Associated Press is reporting that Pensacola mass shooter Mohammed Alshamrani hosted a dinner party before the fatal attack “to watch videos of mass shootings.”
According to AP, the claim comes from an unnamed U.S. official. The official asked for anonymity but was “briefed by federal investigators,” the article claims. It also claims, citing the same official, that one Saudi student “was recording outside the building while the shooting took place” and 10 Saudi students are being held at the base while “several others are still unaccounted for.”
The NAS Pensacola shooter is identified as Saudi national Mohammed Alshamrani. Anyone with information regarding his activites is encouraged to call 1-800-CALL-FBI. FBI Jacksonville is not aware of any credible threat toward the Pensacola community at this time.
AP originally reported that the dinner party took place the day before but now says it was within the same week. “It was earlier in the week, but it is uncertain if it was the night before,” AP reported.
Two of the victims have been named: Mohammed Haitham and Joshua Watson. You can read about their lives here. The third victim has not yet been named.
FacebookThe Pensacola victims
Mohammed Saeed Alshamrani, a Saudi Air Force officer, was identified by multiple news sites as the active shooter armed with a handgun who killed three people and wounded eight more at the Pensacola Naval Air Station in Florida, a military base sometimes called the “Cradle of Naval Aviation.” Officials have not formally confirmed his name.
The gunman has been identified by Florida’s governor as a Saudi national, however. “He was in the aviation pipeline. He was training in aviation,” the base commander said in a news conference.
Authorities have not said whether they are considering the Pensacola shooting an act of terrorism; the AP reported that authorities are looking into whether that’s the case, though. However, a group that monitors Jihadist activity online says it has unearthed a manifesto on Twitter that may belong to the shooter; in it, he rants about America, calling it a nation of evil, and quotes Osama bin Laden, according to the organization. You can read more about that here.
Here’s what you need to know:
Other Saudi Nationals Were Detained for Questioning, Reports Say
A screenshot of the alleged manifesto
Asia Intel, a group that monitors Jihadist activity, has posted screenshots of a now-suspended Twitter page that it says may have belonged to the gunman; this is not confirmed, but the top tweet matches that described by ABC and AFP, which also reported, through a source, that the FBI is investigating social media posts as well as the suspect’s affiliations, including whether he had any accomplices. The group says the Twitter page in question quoted bin Laden and al-Qaeda leader Anwar al-Awlaki.
Heavy has confirmed that Twitter suspended the account that may be the shooter’s; for hours people have been directing vitriol toward the page on Twitter, many of them in Arabic. “I’m sorry American people. This terrorist does not represent us,” wrote one person who responded. Rita Katz, director of the Site Intel Group, which monitors jihadist activity, wrote that the tweet that may be from Pensacola attacker Alshamrani “suggests terrorist motive. Does not claim allegiance to any group, but echos Bin Laden: ‘The security is a shared destiny…You will not be safe until we live it as reality in [Palestine], and American troops get out of our land.'”
The New York Times reported that six other Saudi nationals “were detained for questioning near the scene of the shooting, including three who were seen filming the entire incident.” It wasn’t clear whether they, too, were students or knew Alshamrani, according to The Times.
The base commander confirmed at a news conference that NAS Pensacola hosts international students for flight training.
Four people are deceased (including the suspect), and more were wounded when the shooting broke out on December 6, 2019, according to the sheriff. Two deputies were shot, one in the arm and one in the leg, but they are expected to survive, officials told the media. The first victim was named as Joshua Kaleb Watson, whose brother says he died a hero. You can read more about Watson here.
The shooter fired randomly, but was thwarted from killing more people when someone barricaded a door, according to ABC7.
It was the second mass shooting at a military installation in the United States in one week. An active shooter named Gabriel Romero killed two people at Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard. Romero was a petty officer in the United States Navy.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said he had spoken to the president. “This is a special place… all these brave warriors who wear the wings, they come here for flight training. This is a dark day for a very great place.” He said it “strikes at the heart of the community” – both Pensacola and the Navy overall.
“This day will be etched in your memory for the rest of your life,” Escambia County Sheriff David Morgan said of the effect on families and the Naval community. But he said people could be proud of the Navy and community. “Thank God for the United States of America,” Morgan said
DeSantis said there are “a lot of questions about this individual being a foreign national, being a part of the Saudi Air Forece, and then to be training on our soil and then to do this.” He said authorities are investigating to try to answer all of those questions.
“The government of Saudi Arabia needs to make things better for these victims, and I think they’re going to owe a debt here, given that this is one of their individuals.”
The governor said that “obviously when you have a foreign national involved, you know, particularly in that part of the world, the investigation is going to be different than if it was somebody from a local community.”
U.S. Sen. Rick Scott wrote on Twitter, “I’m very concerned that the shooter in Pensacola was a foreign national training on a US base. Today, I’m calling for a full review of the US military programs to train foreign nationals on American soil. We shouldn’t be providing military training to people who wish us harm.”
Scott continued: “Whether this individual was motivated by radical Islam or was simply mentally unstable, this was an act of terrorism. It’s clear that we need to take steps to ensure that any and all foreign nationals are scrutinized and vetted extensively before being embedded with our American men and women in uniform.”
According to the Associated Press, the suspect was “a Saudi aviation student.”
Alshamrani was a “Saudi Air Force member,” NBC reported. The New York Times called him “Second Lt. Mohammed Saeed Alshamrani.” Metro UK reported that Alshamrani “was in the US learning how to fly American aircraft sold to the Saudi Arabian army.”
WKG-TV reported that the shooter’s training began in 2017 and included English language lessons.
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