Authorities say she ditched the Muslim garb for a combat-style outfit Wednesday, when she and Farook attacked the holiday party in San Bernardino. Reports said the pair had over 1,600 bullets when they were killed.
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A pro-IS news agency, Aamaq, said Friday the mass shooting was perpetrated by sympathizers of the radical group, which has urged followers in the United States and elsewhere to carry out lone wolf attacks.
Should the investigation prove that the attack was indeed inspired by militant Islamism, it would count as the most serious such attack since September 11, 2001.
Three U.S. officials familiar with the San Bernardino, California, massacre have told CNN that the woman involved in the shooting authored – as the incident was occurring – a Facebook post declaring her loyalty to the leader of ISIS.
Tashfeen Malik helped her husband, Syed Farook, kill 14 people at a holiday banquet for his county co-workers before dying in a gunbattle with police.
FBI Director James Comey would not discuss whether anyone affiliated with IS communicated back, but he said there was no indication yet that the plot was directed by any other foreign terror group. But the Facebook post has led investigators to believe that the couple took inspiration from the group, they said. “There is no indication that they are part of a network”. “She stayed upstairs”, said a second family attorney David Chesley.
A Facebook Inc spokesman said the profile in question was removed by the company on Thursday for violating its community standards barring promotion or praise for “acts of terror”.
Bowdich said investigators were scrutinizing evidence seized at the couple’s home to determine what prompted the carnage. Police later said that the package was determined to be safe and posed no threat, according to reports. Khan added he had no independent confirmation from police that his brother-in-law was a suspect and was going off media reports citing authorities.
“We’ve also uncovered evidence that these subjects attempted to destroy their digital fingerprint”, Bowdich said, noting that two “crushed” cell phones were found in a nearby trash can.
“We hope that will take us to their motivation”, he said.
Attorneys for the family of a California shooter are cautioning the public against rushing to judgment about terrorist connections to the attack.
“If the most evidence there is to any affiliation is a Facebook account under another person’s name then that’s hardly anything at all”, David Chesley said.
“At this stage, we do not yet know why the awful event occurred”, said Obama, who has repeatedly called on the Republican-controlled Congress to pass tougher gun control measures, after a string of mass shootings across the United States in recent years. “I think he married a terrorist”, Christian Nwadike told CBS News.
On Friday morning, the owner of the townhome that Farook and Malik rented opened it to reporters. Malik’s family claims they had no knowledge of her sympathies for the group.
According to local officials, her family originated from Karor Lal East in the Layyah District of Pakistan’s Punjab province.
Pakistani intelligence officials say Malik moved as a child with her family to Saudi Arabia 25 years ago. Farook, a 28-year-old restaurant health inspector, was born in Chicago to Pakistani parents and raised in California.
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Two weeks ago, with Americans on edge over the Islamic State attacks in Paris that left 130 people dead, Comey said that US authorities had no specific or credible intelligence pointing to an attack on American soil.
