USA officials have said their investigation has yet to turn up evidence that foreign militants directed Syed Rizwan Farook, 28, or Tashfeen Malik, 29, when the married couple stormed a holiday gathering of Farook’s co-workers at a regional center in San Bernardino on December 2 and opened fire with assault rifles.
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She said she supported it. And she said she wanted to be a part of it, the New York Times reported on Sunday. But immigration officials do not routinely review social media as part of their background checks, and there is a debate inside the Department of Homeland Security over whether it is even appropriate to do so…
The State and Homeland Security departments have said all procedures were carefully followed during the process in the granting of Malik’s K-1 visa.
Investigators say they are looking for the hard drive that was removed from Farook and Malik’s home, but are also hoping to find anything related the attack that killed 14 people.
Investigators are particularly interested in Tashfeen’s life in Pakistan in the years before she moved to the United States. First, her name was assessed by Homeland Security against law enforcement and national security databases.
It is not clear if the background checks cited by the newspaper are the same checks that the State Department officials discussed with CNN.
Malik later passed two other checks against security databases before her visa was OK’d, the two senior State Department officials said.
Federal Bureau of Investigation divers have recovered some items from a San Bernardino lake after scouring it for days for a missing computer hard drive and other clues into the terror attack by a Pakistani-American couple, media reports said today.
Ms. Malik faced three extensive national security and criminal background screenings.
That incredibly effective multi-layered vetting Obama was talking up while promising that the huge numbers of Syrian Muslim migrants he wants to bring to this country will be thoroughly vetted… None of them caught her extremist postings. “On a case-by-case basis, consular officers and our interagency partners may examine any publicly available information, such as social media, about the applicant, including for evidence of the bona fides of the relationship”.
They are seeking the electronic trail of the killers, whom they interacted with, how they hatched and carried out the plot, and why.
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.
“I am the one who spent most of the time with my sister”, she said.
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She said her sister was religious, studied the Quran and prayed five times a day. The date that these types of reviews began is not clear, but it was after Malik was considered, the source said. The family was very anxious and tense, before hanging up the phone, she said.
