Malik, 29, a native of Pakistan who lived in Saudi Arabia for more than 20 years, and her husband, Syed Rizwan Farook, 28, died in a shootout with police hours after the couple fatally shot 14 people at the Inland Regional Centre social services agency in San Bernardino, California, on Wednesday.
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The couple opened fire with assault rifles Wednesday on a holiday luncheon for Farook’s colleagues from the San Bernardino health department, where he worked as a restaurant inspector.
Tashfeen Malik and husband Syed Farook visited ranges in the Los Angeles area, said David Bowdich, assistant director of the FBI’s Los Angeles office.
Around that time, she said, she was surprised to see them both standing on the street one day without acknowledging one another.
“Usually it’s ISIS supporters trying to radicalize young girls online as they try to find new wives, but this may be the first case I know of where the opposite happened”, said Ryan Mauro, an analyst for Clarion Project, which tracks worldwide terrorism. On Friday, the Federal Bureau of Investigation said it is beginning to investigate the shooting as an “act of terrorism” as it was revealed Malik had pledged allegiance to Isis in a now-deleted Facebook post.
The maid said Malik initially wore a scarf that covered her head but not her face.
Farook’s father, also named Syed Farook, told Italian newspaper La Stampa in a report published Sunday that his son “shared (ISIS leader Abu Bakr) Al Baghdadi’s ideology and supported the creation of the Islamic State, and he was obsessed with Israel”.
“There were no contacts between either of the killers and subjects of our investigations that were of such a significance that it raised these killers up onto our radar screen”, he said.
“We always seem to assume only a man would be capable of making a terrorist attack”, she said.
“From what we heard, they lived differently, their mindset is different”.
While radical Islamic groups at times have mobilized women as suicide bombers, and extremist women may exhort their men to attacks, it is extremely rare in conservative Muslim societies for female jihadists to take part in actual combat, as Malik did.
“We think that she had a lot to do with the radicalization process and perhaps with Mr. Farook’s radicalization from within in the United States”, said McCaul, the chair of the House Homeland Security Committee.
Family members said they’ll answer every question posed by investigators.
Malik attended a religious school in the Pakistani city of Multan briefly between 2013 and 2014 but didn’t receive a diploma, Farhat Hashmi, founder of Al-Huda International Seminary, said in a statement on her website. She did not work as a pharmacist in the US. Attorneys representing Farook’s family deny that he or his wife had extremist views.
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She spoke broken English and her primary language was Urdu, he said, adding, “She was very conservative”.
