The bureau said on Friday it lacked evidence the pair belonged to a larger organisation of extremists.
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“Two followers of Islamic State attacked several days ago a center in San Bernadino in California”, the group’s daily online radio broadcast al-Bayan said on Saturday.
Husband and wife were killed in a furious shootout with police hours after they armed themselves with assault rifles and opened fire on a gathering of Farook’s colleagues from the San Bernardino County health department, where he worked as a restaurant inspector. The FBI said it lacked evidence that the married couple who carried out the attack belonged to a larger organization of extremists. They met in person when Farook traveled to Saudi Arabia in 2013 during the Hajj pilgrimage, the attorney said.
Bowdich said neither Farook nor Malik had been under investigation by the FBI or other law enforcement agency prior to Wednesday. 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.
In his weekly radio address, President Barack Obama said it was “entirely possible” that the attackers were radicalized to “commit this act of terror”.
Law enforcement sources authorities told NBC News that suspect Tashfeen Malik, 27, posted a pledge of support to an ISIS leader on Facebook at around the time of the attack.
However, it was uncertain whether the comments were posted by Malik herself or someone with access to her page.
USA authorities were trying to learn what contacts Malik might have had with Islamic militants in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, where she grew up, the official said on condition of anonymity.
Hifza Batool told The Associated Press on Saturday that other relatives have said that Malik, who was her step-niece, used to wear Western clothes but about three years ago began wearing the hijab head covering or the all-covering burqa donned by conservative Muslim women.
And none of the contacts federal agents have since discovered between the couple and the subjects of other FBI inquiries “were of such a significance that it raised these killers up onto our radar screen”, Comey said.
Farook family attorneys, holding a news conference in Los Angeles on Friday, denied there was any evidence that either the husband or wife harbored extremist views.
Abuershaid said Farook’s sisters “would talk to [Malik], and they would see her once in a while”.
For an aunt in Malik’s old hometown in Pakistan, Malik’s growing religious focus was one of the last things she heard about her 29-year-old niece – before last week, when she learned that her niece and her niece’s husband had donned masks, hoisted assault rifles and killed 14 people in a rampage in Southern California.
Investigators are looking into a report he had an argument with a co-worker who denounced the “inherent dangers of Islam”. A native of Pakistan, she appears to have left a less visible footprint here than her U.S.-born husband, who had a public sector job and family here.
“I think I can’t say definitively right now what led either of these two to pick up guns and become murderers”.
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Pakistani Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan said Sunday that his country is ready to share any information it has about Malik and her family.
