Dive teams were searching a lake in San Bernardino for evidence in last week’s terrorist attack, the Federal Bureau of Investigation said Thursday.
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RINGO CHIU/AFP/Getty Images FBI divers continue to scrape the bottom of the Seccombe Lake, a small body of water about two miles north of Farook’s former workplace and the target of the shootings, the Inland Regional Center. David Bowdich, assistant director in charge of the FBI’s Los Angeles field office, said the Bureau is investigating a lead that the suspects visited the lake on the day of the shooting.
One source said investigators have little, if any, evidence that Malik or her husband Farook, 28, had any direct contact with Islamic State, which has seized control of large swaths of Syria and Iraq and claimed responsibility for assaults in Paris last month that left 130 people dead.
Authorities said that they are searching for nothing in particular, but would confirm that they are looking for items associated with the San Bernardino shooting last week.
“This investigation is massive and ongoing”, he said, flanked by San Bernardino Police Chief Jarrod Burguan and San Bernardino County Sheriff John McMahon.
The father works as an engineer, as do his two sons, according to a Pakistani counterterrorism official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the press.
Bowdich also reportedly said that authorities were trying to find links between Farook and a terrorism ring prosecuted in 2012.
A federal official told the Los Angeles Times Thursday that investigators believed Farook asked his friend and relative Marquez to buy the two AR-15s because he was anxious that he “wouldn’t pass a background check” if he tried to buy them himself.
US officials say the couple were inspired by foreign extremist organizations, including the Islamic State, but have yet to piece together exactly when and where the two were radicalized or whether they had support from anybody else. Marquez has not been charged with a crime.
Lawmakers said the FBI wouldn’t provide details about his ties to the case, citing an “ongoing criminal investigation”.
She said she planned to move in with a son to be closer to family and a mosque in nearby Corona, Linda Holmes said. Both Marquez and the bride, Russian-born Mariya Chernykh, list the same home address as Raheel Farook. “My world is upside-down”, she said. The couple died in a shootout with law enforcement hours after the attack, leaving behind a 6-month-old daughter.
Representative Bob Goodlatte of Virginia, the Republican chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, told reporters afterward that there were people in the community who saw suspicious activity at the shooters’ house but decided not to tell authorities “for a variety of reasons”. Risch is a member of the Senate’s Select Committee on Intelligence.
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“They were talking generally about something, but I don’t think it made it to anything specific”, one of the sources said of the earlier plot.
