Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) yesterday claimed responsibility for the mass shooting in San Bernardino, California, that killed 14 people, saying that two of its followers carried out Wednesday’s attack.
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“Two followers of Islamic State attacked several days ago a centre in San Bernardino in California”, the group’s daily online radio broadcast al-Bayan said on Saturday.
This undated photo provided by the California Department of Motor Vehicles shows Syed Rizwan Farook who has been named as the shooting suspect in the San Bernardino shootings.
Malik had posted to Facebook a pledge of allegiance to ISIS leader al-Baghdadi, three USA officials familiar with the investigation said.
The husband and wife were killed in a furious shootout with police hours after they opened fire on a gathering of Farook’s colleagues from the San Bernardino County public health department, where he worked as a restaurant inspector.
Yet Lynch indicated that the nature of last week’s attacks illustrated in deadly relief a long-held fear among law enforcement and intelligence officials of the threat posed by radicalized individuals in the United States who have managed to avoid detection.
“There’s a serious investigation ongoing into what she was doing in Pakistan and in Saudi”, Representative Michael McCaul said on Fox News Sunday.
San Bernadino Sheriff officers point weapons into a neighborhood as they pursue suspects of the shooting at the Inland Regional Center on December 2, 2015 in San Bernardino, California.
Family lawyer Mohammad Abuershaid said that Farook traveled twice to Saudi Arabia – first in 2013 for the Hajj, the annual pilgrimage to Mecca that Muslims are required to make at least once in their lifetimes, then again to marry Malik, whom he’d met through an online dating service.
She spoke broken English and her primary language was Urdu, an attorney said, adding, “She was very conservative”.
The theory of Malik’s prior radicalization is being aggressively pursued as investigators seek a conclusive motive for the attack, said the officials who are not authorized to comment publicly on the developing investigation. “Especially because they were happily married, they had a handsome six-month-old daughter”, Farook s sister Saira Khan told CBS News. And Bowdich said they may have been planning an additional attack.
Malik, born in Pakistan, moved to Saudi Arabia when she was a child. Following the gunbattle, authorities conducted overnight searches of the home that yielded more than 3,000 rounds of ammunition, 12 pipe-bomb-type devices and tools for making more of those explosives.
FBI Director James Comey said Friday that “there’s no indication that they are part of a network” of terrorists.
On Saturday, US President Barack Obama insisted that America “will not be terrorized”.
This statement came as a refutation of the claims spread by US media that Syed Farook, 28, an American citizen of Pakistani origin became radicalised after marrying Tashfeen Malik, 27, “in Saudi Arabia last year”. She said the organization was not political and denounced violence and acts of terrorism.
“None of the family members had any idea that this was going to take place”, attorney David Chesley said during a Friday news conference.
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The family could not even produce a photograph of Malik.
