Florida Sen. [crscore]Marco Rubio[/crscore] warned homegrown violent extremists are one of the biggest threats the country faces Sunday in the wake of the deadly gay nightclub attack in Orlando that killed 50 and injured 53.
Islamic State has taken credit for the attack. Omar Mateen, a U.S. citizen raised in New York who had pledged his allegiance to the terrorist organization, entered the club around 2 a.m., and was eventually killed by police.
“There are hundreds of people like this that we’re watching all across the country that post is threat it’s a really any emerging threat that is very dangerous are the hardest terrorist threat we’ve ever confronted in the history of this country,” Rubio told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer.
The senator said Mateen was not a confused individual, but someone who bought into ISIS’s ideology, and fears there will be more acts of violence in the future.
“It’s a reminder that the war on terror has evolved into something we’ve never had to confront before – individuals capable of conducting these sorts of massacres unexpectedly in places that you normally wouldn’t associate with the kinds of attacks that you see,” he said.
Rubio, a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said to prevent future attacks, the United States need to block terrorist group from going online and radicalizing people.
“This is an ongoing thing that ultimately is going to require the Islamic world to reject radicalism and to basically discard it as a proper way forward – and that’s a huge challenge it’s gonna take a long time and unfortunately in the meantime we’re going to have to continue to fight the war on terror and sadly last night the war on terror came to Orlando,” he said.
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