Bowdich says investigators found 19 pipes in the couple’s home in Redlands, California, that could be turned into bombs with all the right components.
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Malik’s path from Pakistan to the bloody events of last week – when she and her husband slaughtered people gathered for a training session and holiday luncheon – remains a mystery. The Muslim couple were killed hours later in a gunbattle with police.
In a chilling twist, authorities on Monday said that a year before the rampage, Farook’s co-workers underwent “active-shooter” training in the very room where he and his wife opened fire.
“Unfortunately, the room just didn’t provide a whole lot of protection”, said Corwin Porter, assistant county health director.
All of us left bereft by what happened on Wednesday, Dec. 2, 2015, don’t have to rely on the wasted rhetoric from a prime-time television address of a president too cowardly to even enunciate the term “Islamic terrorism”; nor wonder about investigating authorities like the Federal Bureau of Investigation being stuck on “radicalization”.
What we also know is woman after woman in niqabs or hijabs, some with infants, came and went cordially from the Mississauga madrassa on a routine Monday. Al Huda Academy, the school that is run by Farhat Hashmi, is one of those places that teaches negative things. She said the organization was not political and denounced violence and acts of terrorism.
She also took classes at the Multan branch of Al-Huda International Seminary, a women-only madrassa with branches across Pakistan and in the US and Canada. “Such people should be punished, must be punished”, said Jamil of Tashfeen, adding: “She has dishonoured Pakistan”.
Malik studied pharmacy at the Bahauddin Zakariya University in the central city of Multan, where she got a degree in 2013.
Hashmi, an Islamic scholar in her 50s, founded a network of religious schools that has educated thousands of mainly urban, upper-middle class Pakistani women in a conservative strain of Islam.
During Malik’s time as a pharmacy student at the Multan university, starting in 2007, as Taliban attacks shook Pakistan, the area around Multan and her nearby hometown gained notoriety as centres of radical sectarian activity.
She added: “Government or law enforcement agencies have never suspected us of spreading extremism – instead we preach the peaceful teachings of Islam and the prophet of Islam”. “What they understand as the pure Islam is something very, very conservative and fundamentalist”, she said.
“We can not be held responsible for personal acts of any of our students”, said the statement posted on Hasmi’s and the foundation’s website.
A fellow student who requested anonymity told AFP that Malik lived in university accommodation for two years before moving into a house with her mother and another sister, also a student. She started the two-year course in mid-April of 2013 to learn about the Quran, its translation and interpretation, but she did not finish her studies before leaving in May 2014. One of Malik’s former classmates at the Bahauddin Zakariya University said she drastically changed during her time there.
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.
Malik’s family, who have been estranged from her father for decades, say they are sickened by her killing spree and believe she was radicalized in Saudi Arabia.
“One of the teachers at the seminary, Aalia Qamar, said Malik attended classes regularly, and introduced three or four of her friends to the school”. “In comparison with my students of earlier decades, they are less confident, less willing to ask questions in class, and most have become silent note-takers”.
Police and security officials on campus in the Punjabi city of Multan said intelligence officers had been stationed there to monitor militancy among 35,000 students studying in red-brick buildings set amid neatly kept grounds. Malik and her husband Syed Farook were killed in a shootout with police.
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Malik’s aunt, Hafza Batool, told Los Angeles Times Sunday that her family was in shock about Malik’s actions.
