The FBI began investigating the fatal shooting of 14 people in California by a married couple as an “act of terrorism“, officials said on Friday, noting the wife was believed to have pledged allegiance to a leader of the militant group ISIS.
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The official said Tashfeen Malik made her posts under an alias.
The couple was killed hours later after a auto chase and a fierce gun battle with police.
Farook was born in Chicago to Pakistani parents and raised in California. Due to this, researchers have looked in depth to a report that establishes a discussion between him and a colleague that denounced the “inherent dangers of Islam” before the shooting, said a source in the government of the United States.
Comey said there were no indications that the couple was part of a terrorist cell or a network of terrorism.
Initial reports indicated that the shooting at the city’s Inland Regional Center occurred during a holiday party for county public health employees, and that Farook had left the party angrily earlier in the evening.
If proven to be terrorism, the San Bernardino massacre would be the deadliest attack by Islamic extremists on American soil since 9/11. The investigation has been focused on the motivation for the attack, with officials, including U.S. President Barack Obama and San Bernardino Police Chief Jarrod Burguan, saying it may have been motivated by extremist ideology.
“It is unfair – it is a double-standard – for anyone to come out and say, well, you know, this person was a Muslim and therefore it’s terrorism and so on and so forth, when the Planned Parenthood situation arises and no one goes to the religious community and says, hey, what do you say?”
It was made as the attacks happened, The Associated Press reported. Farook also traveled overseas in 2013, Bowdich said.
Farook had no criminal record, and neither he nor his wife was under scrutiny by local or federal law enforcement before the attack, authorities said. Following the gunbattle, authorities conducted overnight searches of the home that yielded more than 3,000 rounds of ammunition, 12 pipe-bomb-type devices and tools for making more of those explosives.
San Bernardino police Chief Jarrod Burguan says Friday night that the item has been rendered safe and posed no threat.
Despite mounting signs of the couple’s radicalization, there “is a lot of evidence that doesn’t quite make sense”, Comey said in a nod to the fact that the investigation was just two days old.
“The most evidence they have so far is that somebody looked at something on Facebook”, the lawyer said.
Authorities identified the victims as six women and eight men ranging in age from 26 to 60.
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The soft-spoken Farook was known to pray every day at San Bernardino’s Dar Al Uloom Al Islamiyah mosque. “She was very happy that night”, said Nasima Nila, 31, who attended the reception at the Islamic Center of Riverside.
