ORLANDO, Fla. — The Orlando massacre at a popular gay nightclub shows no one yet has “found the magic bullet” to prevent Americans from being inspired to violence by jihadist propaganda on the internet, Attorney General Loretta Lynch said Tuesday as she visited a city still shaken by the shootings.
Countering the narrative of radical extremism continues to be a challenge for the government, Lynch said in an interview with The Associated Press.
“How do we break that chain? How do we counter this extremist ideology that’s online, knowing that the internet has to remain free and open?” she said. “What can we get out there that’s a counter-message to that?”
At the scene of the carnage, workers removed a temporary fence that was erected around the Pulse nightclub. State officials wondered how they would pay for resources drained by the June 12 massacre, and investigators kept probing for gunman Omar Mateen’s motives for the rampage, in which 49 people were killed and dozens more wounded. Mateen died in a gunbattle with police.
Lynch said investigators may never pinpoint a single motive and have not ruled out witness reports suggesting Mateen might have been at Pulse before or had gay interests.
In a 911 call from the club, Mateen pledged solidarity with the Islamic State group, and Lynch said there’s no doubt, based on evidence gathered during the investigation, that he had read and absorbed extremist propaganda on the internet.
“We believe that is certainly one avenue of radicalization, but we want to know if there are others,” she said in the interview. “We want to know everything he did in the days, weeks and months leading up to this attack.”
“We still do believe that this was an act of terror and an act of hate,” she added.
“A lot of people are looking at this, and I don’t know that anyone has found that magic bullet or that way to break that chain,” she said.
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