Five nightclub shooting victims still in grave condition Monday

Five of the 53 wounded victims of a shooting rampage in an Orlando, Fla., nightclub that left 50 dead, including the gunman, were in grave condition Monday, a hospital said.

Hospital officials, however, say they are "very optimistic" that the nightclub shooting victims being treated at Orlando Regional Medical Center will recover.

Orlando Health officials tweeted Monday that they no longer need to give "major amounts of blood" to shooting victims.

The hospital says many survivors had "multiple high-velocity" gunshot wounds and many in the intensive care unit no longer need ventilators to breathe.

The hospital holds weekly trauma simulations, along with periodic large-scale, city-wide simulations.

Officials say the training left the hospital well-stocked for mass casualties.

The trauma medical director, Dr. Joseph Ibrahim, says the only thing he would change is that more victims could have gotten to the hospital sooner so that that they could have saved more people.

Meanwhile Monday, the families of 24 of the dead have been notified, officials said.

The city is posting the names of the slain victims on its website once relatives have been notified.

Omar Mateen, 29, entered the popular Pulse Club at around 2 a.m. Sunday armed with an AR-15-style rifle and a pistol and opened fire on a crowd of about 300.

The gay nightclub was sponsoring a Hispanic night event.

He was killed when SWAT officers used an armored vehicle to enter the building at around 5 a.m. to rescue the hostages he continued to hold.

Mateen pledged allegiance to ISIS in a 911 call at the time of the attack, but there isn’t any evidence yet that he was communicating with Islamic State members overseas.

President Barack Obama says there's no clear evidence that Mateen was directed to conduct his attack or part of a larger plot.

He says it appears Mateen was inspired by extremist information disseminated over the internet.

Mr. Obama says the investigation is at the preliminary stages and is being treated as a terrorism investigation.

He says the attack appears to be similar to last year's shooting spree in San Bernardino, Calif.

The president says investigators are still looking into the motivations of the shooter, including the fact that the shooting took place at a gay venue.

Mr. Obama spoke in the Oval Office after being briefed on the investigation by FBI Director James Comey, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson and other officials.

Comey said Mateen had "strong indications of radicalization" and was likely inspired by foreign terrorist organizations.

Comey told reporters later Monday that Mateen spoke with a 911 operator three times early Sunday morning.

Mateen also pledged loyalty to the head of the Islamic State group on his last call, Comey said.

The FBI investigated Mateen for 10 months beginning in May 2013.

Comey said investigators later introduced him to confidential sources, followed him and reviewed details of some of his communications.

Court documents in relation to Omar Mateen's petition to legally change his name in 2006, the same year he graduated from Indian River Community College were released Monday.

They detail Mateen's various jobs and say he was born in Queens, NY, and moved to Port Saint Lucie, Fla., in 1991.

Between 2001 and 2006, he worked at eight jobs, including a Publix grocery store, Circuit City, Chick-Fil-A and a Walgreens drugstore.

Then his jobs begin focusing more on vitamins and health.

He worked at Nutrition World in Fort Pierce, Gold's Gym and a GNC store in a mall.

The records show that he changed his name from Omar Mir Seddique to Omar Mir Seddique Mateen.

The documents don't say why he changed his name.

Saudi Arabia's Interior Ministry says Orlando shooter Omar Mateen visited the kingdom twice to perform an Islamic pilgrimage.

Interior Ministry spokesman Maj. Gen. Mansour al-Turki told The Associated Press in a text message Monday that Mateen first visited Saudi Arabia for 10 days in March 2011 and again a year later in March 2012 for eight days.

Mateen had performed what is known as the umrah pilgrimage, a series of religious rites carried out in Mecca by millions of Muslims from around the world each year.

This pilgrimage is shorter than the annual hajj.

Most pilgrims will also travel to the nearby city of Medina, where the Prophet Muhammad is buried and where he built the first mosque.

American Muslim leaders say their faith offers no justification for the massacre at a gay nightclub in Orlando that left 50 people dead and dozens more wounded.

Saif Inam of the Muslim Public Affairs Council called the attack a "hateful homophobic killing spree."

Nihad Awad, the national executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, condemned the killings as a hate crime.

Awad said members of the LGBT community have stood with Muslims in the past and American Muslims stand with them now.

Zuhdi Jasser, who heads the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, says the massacre during the holy month of Ramadan is a reminder that he and other Muslim Americans "are at war with political Islam."

Mateen’s father, Seddique Mir Mateenm, told reporters Monday that the attack was against his principles and against what he taught his son.

Seddique Mir Mateen said the family is shocked by what happened and that if he'd known what his son was planning, he would have arrested him himself.

Orlando police Chief John Mina provided additional details about the shooting during a news conference Monday morning.

He said an extra officer was working at the Pulse nightclub in full uniform.

The officer engaged Mateen near an entrance.

Additional officers entered, and engaged the suspect in another gun battle.

Mateen then retreated to the bathroom.

"At that time we were able to save and rescue dozens and dozens of people and get them out of the club,” Mina said.

Officers then secured everything, and the SWAT team was brought in.

Mina says officers then set up for an explosive breach on the bathroom wall. Mina says he made the decision to breach the wall, which created a hole through which dozens of club patrons were rescued.

Then Mateen exited through the same hole, and engaged in another gun battle with officers in which he was killed.

Officials say that families of 24 of the victims from the massacre at a Florida nightclub have been notified.

Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer described the progress at a Monday morning news conference.

He says that by 11 p.m. Sunday, all bodies of victims had been turned over to medical examiner.

The FBI investigated Mateen in 2013 after he made inflammatory comments to co-workers alleging possible ties to terrorists.

The following year, the agency looked into potential ties connecting Mateen to Moner Mohammad Abusalha, the first American to carry out a suicide attack in Syria.

He was cleared after both investigations.

President Barack Obama Sunday called the shooting an "act of terror" and an "act of hate."

He said Sunday that the FBI is investigating it as an act of terrorism and that no effort will be spared to determine whether the gunman, Omar Saddiqui Mateen, 29, of Port St. Lucie, Fla., was affiliated with terrorist groups.

Mr. Obama noted that the killer targeted a gay nightclub.

He says it's a "sobering reminder" that an attack on any American is an attack "on all of us."

The shooting started at around 2 a.m. at the Pulse Club in Orlando as Mateen ran into the club and began taking hostages from among an estimated 300 customers inside.

Three hours later, authorities used an armored vehicle to break into the building and end the attack.

"It appears he was organized and well-prepared," Orlando police Chief John Mina said.

The gunman had an assault-type weapon, a handgun and "some type of (other) device on him."

Mateen, who used an AR-15-type assault rifle, was killed when the SWAT team entered the building, saving the lives of as many as 30 hostages.

Mateen’s, father said he was in shock and that he wasn't aware of anything his son might have been planning.

Mir Seddique told NBC News that his son got angry when he saw two men kissing in Miami a couple of months ago and thinks that may be related to the shooting.

"We are saying we are apologizing for the whole incident. ... We are in shock like the whole country."

Seddique Mateen is a native of Afghanistan who appears on a television program on broadcast on a California channel that’s known for "its anti-US tirades" and "pro-Taliban" remarks, which are broadcast in the Dari language, according to a former Afghan official who spoke only on condition of anonymity because he did not want to be linked to coverage of the shooting.

The official said Seddique Mateen's "Durand Jirga Show," is anti-Pakistan.

The name of the show references the Durand line, the long disputed border between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Seddique Mateen campaigned in the United States for current Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, who appeared on his program in 2014.

The program's studio has an address in Fort Pierce, Fla.

Dr. Mike Cheatham, a trauma surgeon at Orlando Regional Medical Center, where 46 patients were taken, said most of the injured were in critical condition.

"I think we will see the death toll rise,” he said.

A law enforcement official says gunman was known to the FBI before the incident and had been looked at by agents within the last few years.

The official spoke to The Associated Press Sunday about the shooting, the deadliest in U.S. history.

The official was not authorized to discuss the ongoing investigation and on spoke on condition of anonymity.

Mateen had been licensed as a private security officer in Florida.

State records show suspected shooter Omar Mateen held the firearms license since at least 2011. It was set to expire in September 2017.

It wasn't immediately clear where, if anywhere, Mateen had worked as a security officer.

An armed guard license in Florida requires 28 hours of classroom training by a licensed instructor.

Police departments across the country increased patrols near locations frequented by the LGBT community after the massacre.

In Los Angeles, the mayor says a heavily armed person who was headed to a gay pride parade had been arrested by Santa Monica police.

Mayor Eric Garcetti says the arrest was completely unrelated to the Orlando nightclub shooting.

Officer Ernesto Rodriguez of Miami Beach Police Department says the agency is saddened by the massacre and out of an abundance of caution will step up patrols.

Boston Pride organizers plan to hold a moment of silence at this weekend's scheduled block parties to honor the Orlando victims and police there said there will be a heavier presence at those events.

The Baltimore Police Department says it is reaching out to the city's LBGT community to discuss concerns and safety after the Orlando massacre.

Dallas police also boosted manpower in the city’s entertainment districts in response to the shooting.

“This act of terrorism is a tragic illustration of the legitimate safety fears that those in our LGBT community live with every day. That’s why our LGBT brothers and sisters need more than our prayers right now,” Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings said in a statement.