The search began Thursday after authorities learned the shooters, Syed Rizwan Farook, 28, and Tashfeen Malik, 29, may have been in the area the day of the attack, said David Bowdich, chief of the FBI’s Los Angeles office.
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SAN BERNARDINO An underwater search for a computer hard drive and anything else linked to the husband-and-wife shooters who killed 14 in the San Bernardino attacks has concluded. But none uncovered that Malik talked openly on social media about her views on violent jihad.
“In cases where those lists don’t hit, there’s nothing that distinguishes them from people we would love to welcome to this country”. Immigration officials don’t usually review social media posts as part of background checks and most of the process is spent on vetting against marriage fraud.
The discovery of social media posts has exposed a significant and perhaps inevitable shortcoming in how foreigners are screened when they enter the U.S., particularly as people everywhere disclose more about themselves online.
Officials told the newspaper that there’s an internal debate going on within the Department of Homeland Security over whether such checks should be done. After coming to the United States and formally marrying Farook here, she applied for her green card and received another round of criminal and security checks.
In order for Malik to gain permanent residency in the United States, she faced three extensive national security and criminal background screenings – two of which were conducted in-person.
All those reviews came back clear, and the F.B.I. has said it had no incriminating information about Ms. Malik or Mr. Farook in its databases.
They are seeking the electronic trail of the killers and trying to find out whom they interacted with, how they hatched and carried out the plot, and why.
Had any of those posts been discovered during the multiple background checks run against her when she applied to move to the USA on a fiancée visa, she would have likely been denied entry.
Johnson said it was too soon to tell if the government missed signs that Malik may have been radicalized before she was approved for her visa.
From 2007 to 2012, she lived in a university hostel and then with her mother and sister Fehda at a family home in Multan, Pakistan.
An interview and a cursory check of Malik’s application might have revealed that she used a phony address and had attended an Islamist school in Pakistan which critics say forges an anti-Western view in students.
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“That assumes, and this investigation is still under way, that there were flags that were raised or should have been raised in the process of her admission to the United States, and I am not prepared to say that and I’m not prepared to make that declaration”, Johnson said. Because she was applying for a fiancee visa, the interview primarily sought to prove she knew Farook and really was in a relationship with him. “She had no contact with any militant organisation or person, male or female”. She also said that her sister was religious, studied the holy book and prayed five times a day. “She knew what was right and what was wrong”, Fehda Malik said.
