An FBI dive team prepares to search Seccombe Lake for evidence in connection with last week’s fatal shooting at Inland Regional Center, Friday, Dec. 11, 2015, in San Bernardino, Calif. The FBI says divers are searching the lake in a San Bernardino park because leads indicate the shooters who killed 14 people at a holiday party had been in the area.
Advertisement
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. He’s also told investigators that he plotted another attack in California with Farook in 2012, US officials said.
“It’s protected to say that the details about what occurred previous to their marriage and to the assaults in San Bernardino was acquired by way of forensic investigations of these particular person lives”, Hurd stated. Farook and Malik were killed hours later in a shootout with police, leaving behind a 6-month-old daughter.
Addressing reporters at the park on Thursday, the Federal Bureau of Investigation declined to specify what the divers were looking for.
The FBI’s David Bowdich says they are following up on leads that Farook and Malik came to the lake around the time of the attack.
Marquez said that Farook sought the weapons from him in an effort to cover his tracks, since Farook thought buying the guns could draw attention, according to the law enforcement official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the ongoing investigation.
That year, four individuals in Riverside – the same town where Farook and Marquez lived – were arrested and convicted of terrorism.
This radicalization appears to predate the rise of the Islamic State, the terrorist group that in 2014 formally declared a caliphate in parts of Iraq and Syria.
But U.S. government sources have said there was no evidence that the Islamic State even knew of the couple before the killings.
Earlier on Thursday, FBI Director James Comey and other senior US officials briefed members of Congress – behind closed doors – on the investigation.
“The current impression is that these two people were acting alone”, U.S. Senator Angus King of ME told CNN after the briefing. But he added that he was troubled by the fact that the couple had tried to cover their tracks by destroying their cellphones and other electronic equipment.
Advertisement
As federal authorities attempt to piece together the circumstances surrounding the San Bernardino attack, they’ve been questioning Enrique Marquez, a former neighbor and friend of Farook. But the couple never surfaced on law enforcement’s radar and Malik was able to enter the US on a fiancée visa past year despite having professed radical views online. Jim Risch, a Republican who sits on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Marquez has not been charged with a criminal offense.
