SAN BERNARDINO FBI divers re-entered the waters of Seccombe Lake today as they continued their investigation into the deadly mass shooting at the Inland Regional Center that killed 14 people last week.
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Authorities have said Enrique Marquez, an old friend of San Bernardino attacker Syed Rizwan Farook, purchased two assault rifles used in last week’s fatal shooting that killed 14 people.
Farook, a US citizen, and his Pakistani-born wife, opened fire December 2 at a holiday luncheon attended by many of Farook’s co-workers in the San Bernardino health department. Marquez is said to have provided two of the guns that Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, used in last Wednesday’s massacre at San Bernardino’s Inland Regional Center. The FBI said the four individuals’ terror plot was to join the Taliban and fight overseas.
The FBI had no comment on reports it may be a hard drive that the shooters wanted to destroy. But the couple never surfaced on law enforcement’s radar and Malik was able to enter the USA on a fiancée visa past year despite having professed radical views online.
The number of organizations Malik, 29, tried to contact and how she tried to contact them were unclear, but the groups nearly certainly included al-Qaida’s Syria-based official affiliate, the Nusra Front, the sources said.
Militant groups sought out by Malik likely ignored her approaches because they have become extremely wary of responding to outsiders they do not know or who have not been introduced to them, sources said.
Farook was self-radicalizing around that time, FBI Director James Comey said, and met Malik soon after, eventually escorting her to the United States.
“We are building a timeline of everything we know to determine if other contacts were made that day”, Bowdich said.
Malik, who grew up in Saudi Arabia and married Farook there before returning with him to California in 2014, is believed to have pledged allegiance to the leader of Islamic State on Facebook just before the attack.
“The current impression is that these two people were acting alone”, U.S. Senator Angus King of ME told CNN after the briefing.
He said one of the gunmen in last May’s shooting outside a Prophet Mohammed cartoon contest in Garland, Texas had exchanged more than 100 messages prior to the attack that investigators still had been unable to access. Jim Risch, a Republican who sits on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
He drew comparisons to heightened scrutiny law enforcement placed on Italian-American and Irish-American communities during past investigations of organized crime.
“We’re still working our way through the electronic devices and communications they have”, he said. “It’s a small percentage, but to me, the only way you find out about it in advance is having sources and informers on the ground, having constant surveillance”.
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Marquez lived next door to where Farook once lived. Marquez was married to a woman who appears to be a relative of Tatiana Farook, the wife of Syed’s brother Raheel, according to county records.
