The disclosure means that Malik’s radicalization had already begun when she applied for a visa to come to the U.S.to get married, and that the government’s vetting process apparently failed to detect it. Comey said he didn’t know enough to say whether weaknesses in the visa process enabled her to enter the U.S. Investigators said that their desired target however was involved with numerous terror-related arrests at the time, which may have spooked them into aborting their operation.
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Officials have previously said that the Muslim couple had been radicalized “for some time” but had given no indication whether one member of the couple influenced the other or when they first became interested in violent Islamist ideology.
Investigators are still trying to piece together profiles of the couple who killed 14 people and died in a gunbattle with police last week.
A week after the rampage, investigators have assembled a fuzzy portrait of the couple who carried out the attack before they were killed in a shootout with police.
Malik gave a false address in Pakistan on her K-1 visa, using a neighborhood or street near her home, according to theLos Angeles Times. Authorities say this is a precautionary measure to make sure Farook’s parents don’t leave the country.
Officials speaking to CNN said Farook and the unidentified conspirator were studying California sites for a possible attack.
Two of the Inland Regional Center’s buildings will reopen next year, a spokeswoman for the center said.
State documents showed that previous year Marquez married Mariya Chernykh, whose sister is married to Farook’s brother, Syed Raheel Farook, a U.S. Navy veteran.
After finding the residence padlocked and chained shut, authorities got inside and seized religious instruction books, audio CDs with Quran readings and various documents, according to Pakistani intelligence sources.
Chesley told CNN that the father was on medications and didn’t recall making those comments to the Italian newspaper. Federal law enforcement sources told Reuters that Marquez had checked himself into a Los Angeles-area psychiatric facility soon after the shooting.
Asked whether in hindsight he or others at the range should have been suspicious of Farook, Galletta said: “How are you able to determine what somebody’s intents are?”
A former friend of San Bernardino shooter Syed Farook has admitted that the extremist gunman’s plans for violence dated back to at least 2012, when he planned out other ideas for launching attacks.
Authorities also discovered 19 pipes in the couple’s home in Redlands, California, that could be turned into bombs, Bowdich said.
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A law enforcement official told Fox News on Tuesday that officials are looking “very closely” at Mailk’s family overseas as also being radicalized.
