Syed Raheel Farook, the older brother of San Bernardino shooter Syed Rizwan Farook, has been arrested after an Federal Bureau of Investigation search of his home in California and charged with involvement in an alleged marriage/immigration-fraud scheme involving his Russian wife, her sister, and a man who bought weapons used in the terror attack carried out by Farook’s brother and his brother’s wife on December 2, 2015.
Advertisement
Officials said the charges against Syed Raheel Farook, whose brother Syed Rizwan Farook and sister-in-law, Pakistan-born Tashfeen Malik, killed 14 people at a December 2 holiday party, follow an immigration-related investigation that began with the probe into the massacre.
Syed Raheel Farook, his wife Tatiana, and her sister Mariya Chernykh were taken into custody by the Federal Bureau of Investigation after raids on homes in Corona and Ontario, California.
The trio is accused of lying under oath to help get immigration benefit for Chernykh, 26.
U.S. Magistrate David Bristow presided over the arraignment, which doubled as a bail-setting conference, turning into a three-hour saga during which the defendants’ attorneys challenged terms and conditions sought by the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
The filing also said federal prosecutors don’t object to a delay. Bristow set her bond at $50,000, which her boyfriend, Oscar Romero, agreed to meet.
The shooting in San Bernardino “showed yet again how our nation’s legal immigration system can be subverted and exploited by those intent on doing this country harm”, Joseph Macias, special agent in charge of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations arm in Los Angeles, said in a statement. Marquez has already been charged with a sham marriage.
All the while, Marquez was living with his mother next door to the house where the Farook brothers grew up, and Chernykh was living in a different city with her boyfriend, according to the criminal complaint against Marquez.
Syed Raheel Farook and Tatiana Farook allegedly participated in the conspiracy by witnessing the wedding and allegedly taking staged family pictures of the couple to create an illusion that they were a happy couple, the indictment states.
The three people arrested on Thursday were not charged with any crimes related to terrorism or the December shooting.
Days later, Marquez posted on social media that he “was involved in terrorist plots and he might go to prison for fraud”, the indictment said.
“It suggests to me they weren’t talking so the government chose to ask a grand jury to return charges”, Wedick said. In an instant-message exchange last November, Marquez and Chernykh discussed their mutual anxiety for their upcoming immigration interview “due to the lack of contact with each other”, the indictment states.
His attorney Ron Cordova underlined before the judge at Thursday’s hearing that the case against Syed Raheel Farook and his wife was about a “misrepresentation in an act of marriage, it’s not about an act of terror”.
Advertisement
The three are charged with conspiring to maintain a sham marriage between one of the women and Enrique Marquez Jr., a friend of Farook’s who has been charged separately.
