Security Firm Denies Blame In Pulse Tragedy

British multinational security services company G4S plc defended itself against a lawsuit filed by survivors and families of the victims of the Pulse nightclub shooting with a response filed Aug. 21 that explained it was subsidiary G4S Secure Solutions that employed gunman Omar Mateen, rather than the parent company. 

Chris O – Pulse Nightclub
Law enforcement officials work at the nightclub in Orlando, Fla., following the a mass shooting.

G4S argued that it should be dropped from the lawsuit because it didn’t have operational control over the subsidiary and the parent company was “not involved with any aspect of Mateen’s employment.” 

As for the Jupiter, Mo.-based subsidiary G4S Secure Solutions, it filed a response earlier in August that said the lawsuit should be dismissed because Mateen wasn’t working for the company when he committed the massacre at the Orlando gay nightclub.

“Mateen spent his own money as a private citizen to purchase the firearms and ammunition he used to carry out his attack,” G4S and its subsidiaries wrote in its responses, the Orlando Sentinel reported.

The lawsuit points a finger at G4S for continuing to employ Mateen as a security guard and failing to revoke his firearms license after he was investigated by the FBI in 2013-2014 as a potential terrorist. The FBI case, which closed by concluding that Mateen wasn’t a threat, was launched after co-workers reported that “Mateen had claimed connections to the terrorist groups Al Qaeda and Hezbollah, and wanted to die as a martyr,” according to the Los Angeles Times.

The suit blames G43 for issuing a mental-health validation for Mateen that was reviewed before he purchased the weapons used in the shooting at Pulse, the Sentinel reported.

The June 2016 attack is the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history, with 49 people killed and more than 50 wounded.