The heavily armed couple opened fire on Farook’s co-workers from the county Environmental Health Department during a Christmas party at the Inland Regional Center social services agency in San Bernardino.
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Authorities said last week that the Pakistani-born Malik, 29, pledged her support for the Islamic State group and its leader under an alias Facebook account shortly before the assault in San Bernardino. Police shot and killed him and his wife in a shootout shortly after the San Bernardino massacre on Wednesday.
If the shooting proves to have been the work of people inspired by Islamic militants, it would mark the most lethal such attack in the United States since those by al Qaeda on September 11, 2001.
Maria Cernyk’s sister, Tatiana, is married to Syed Raheel Farook, the shooter’s older brother.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation is examining financial activity they engaged in before their attack, a USA government source said earlier on Tuesday.
Prosper is a leading player in the burgeoning world of online, peer-to-peer lending, acting as a middleman matching borrowers and investors who fund their loans.
Investigators are attempting to determine whether the attack was part of a broader plot, and if so, who might have financed it. NBC News has confirmed that the attackers received an unusual $28,500 deposit in the weeks before the shootings, but details regarding the source of the money were not immediately available.
Two sources said Farook and Malik had practiced their shooting skills at a Riverside, California-area gun range for a year or more before last Wednesday’s attack on a holiday office party.
“Our hearts and prayers go out to the victims and everyone else impacted by the tragedy in San Bernardino”. According to family accounts, nobody, including the mother, ever looked in the garage – where Farook and Malik had amassed 12 pipe bombs, thousands of rounds of ammunition, and other tools of the home-grown terrorist trade (e.g. a Christmas tree lamp used in making a timed hand grenade) – because it was deemed Mr. Farook’s “man cave”. A senior law enforcement official said this week that Farook attempted to contact al-Nusra and Al-Shabaab but didn’t say when or how those attempts were made.
The family connection, revealed in marriage documents seen by Reuters, adds another element to the relationship between Farook and Marquez.
Enrique Marquez once lived next to Farook, and purchased the two rifles used in the attack back in 2011 and 2012. Investigators were also looking to sources in Saudi Arabia, where Malik lived as a child. At one point, the official said, Marquez went eight months between visits.
Malik passed several government background checks and entered the U.S.in July 2014 on a K-1 visa, which allowed her to travel to the country and get married within 90 days of arrival. Raheel Farook and his wife, Tatiana, were witnesses to the Marquez-Chernykh nuptials.
The San Bernardino killings have made Muslims in America an issue in the U.S. presidential race.
In a televised address Sunday from the White House, President Barack Obama described the shooting as lone wolf terrorism.
On Tuesday, two US officials told CNN there are indications the couple were on the path to believing terrorism was the answer before the Islamic State terror group declared itself to be a caliphate in June 2014. He said the ban would be temporary.
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A sheriff’s detective who won praise for his bold shepherding of frightened people out of the Southern California building where a couple opened fire last week says it was a insane situation and he did nothing that anyone in his position wouldn’t have done.
