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#Ft.LauderdaleShooter To Face Death Penalty Trial-Indicted On Twenty-Two Counts By Federal Grand Jury [VIDEO]
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Fort Lauderdale airport shooter, Esteban Santiago, has been indicted by a Federal Grand Jury on twenty two counts for shooting up the arrival hall of the airport last month. Santiago who showed up in the Anchorage Alaska office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in 2016 complaining of hearing voices and claiming that the CIA was controlling his mind and forcing him to watch ISIS propaganda videos. He was checked into a mental health facility and allowed authorities to keep his gun for “safe keeping”. After being released from the hospital he was given back the same gun that he would use in the Ft. Lauderdale shooting.
The counts against Santiago include eleven counts of performing an act of violence against a person at an airport serving international civil aviation that caused death or serious bodily injury, six counts of use and discharge of a firearm, and five counts of causing the death of a person through the use of a firearm. According to a report from the U.S. Department of Justice:
“Santiago carried out an armed attack on newly-arrived passengers retrieving their luggage in the Terminal 2 baggage claim area of the Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Santiago pulled out a handgun and started shooting at numerous victims, aiming at the victims’ heads and bodies until he was out of ammunition. Santiago killed five people and wounded six more.”
The only reason that Santiago seemed to stop was that he exhausted his supply of ammunition (15 rounds) after which he laid down on the floor of the airport and was arrested by deputies. The sad thing about all of this is that Santiago is a veteran who served a tour in Iraq, during which he lost two of his buddies to a bomb that went off next to them. In an interview with a British news source last month, his mother Elizabeth Santiago, begged for mercy for her son and insisted he had not been in contact with anyone from ISIS.
Santiago certainly seems to have been radicalized somewhere though since in the photo above he is seen wearing a kaffiyeh which is a symbol of support for the Palestinians and flashing the sign of the ummah, also referred to as “the one”. What is the ummah? The ummah is the belief that there is one religion, and that is Islam. It is at the heart of the political ideology that drives groups like ISIS whose “national anthem” is a song called My Ummah Dawn Has Appeared.
“The concept of ummah might seem to correspond to our understanding of a nation, but there are important differences. The nation is a strictly political concept; it may be defined as a community of peoples possessing a given territory with their own government; citizenship involves giving allegiance to the State, independently of a person’s religious commitment. By contrast, citizenship in the ummah very much involves commitment to a particular religion. To the Muslim way of thinking, the only ummah that counts is the Ummah Islamiyyah, the Islamic Community, an entity that theoretically comprises all Muslims throughout the world, whatever their national origin. In Islamic thought, “The Ummah” represents a universal world order, ruled by an Islamic government (the Caliph) in accordance with the “Law of God” (the Shariah, Islamic religious law), and patterned after the community founded by Muhammad at Medina in 622 AD; it even includes Jews and Christians living within its territory as separate (and inferior) communities.”
In the coming months it should be very enlightening to see what comes out in this trail and to hear the defenses arguments about why their client deserves to continue to live even though he gunned down five people on that sunny January morning in Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood airport. Personally I doubt that there is anything compelling that they can tell me to convince me that is the case.
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