Farook and Malik traveled together to the United States in July 2014, Farook with his U.S. passport and Malik with her fiancee visa inside her Pakistani passport.
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Today the Federal Bureau of Investigation will tell lawmakers what its director could not say in public, when he dropped this bombshell about the San Bernardino shooters: “They were actually radicalized before they started courting or dating each other online”.
Investigators also have been looking into the couple’s ties with Enrique Marquez, a boyhood friend of Farook and Muslim convert who bought the two rifles used in the attack.
“San Bernardino involved two killers who were radicalised for quite a long time before their attack”, FBI Director James Comey told members of the Senate Judiciary Committee during a Congressional hearing yesterday.
Specifically, investigators are taking a new look at one of the four men who was arrested in the 2012 case, Sohiel Kabir.
The investigation into the motivation of the couple who committed a mass shooting in San Bernardino, CA, has moved to a nearby lake, where FBI agents are searching for submerged evidence.
Ramirez said Marquez rarely spoke about his family or his marriage but is friendly once he knows someone.
The details behind the marriage between Marquez and Russian-born Chernykh reveal a much more complex relationship between Marquez and Farook than mere neighbors, according to the Daily Mail.
When asked if the shooters had any connections to other individuals who had been radicalized in this country, Sen. He was also their friend, neighbor and in-law.
The search is related to the investigation into the massacre, according to a law enforcement official who was briefed on the investigation but was not authorized to speak publicly.
Farook and Malik’s names likely arose during an earlier FBI investigation but didn’t raise any flags, Reuters reported Thursday afternoon, citing a source.
Armida Chacon, Marquez’s mother, told reporters outside her home Thursday that she didn’t know “how this happened”.
Melley reported from Los Angeles. He has yet to be charged in the probe and could potentially be offered a plea bargain if he cooperates. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) posed this question to FBI Director James B. Comey, suggesting that if the revelation be true, it would be a “game changer”.
Their efforts there are focused on a bespectacled former Walmart employee, Enrique Marquez, and his purchase of a pair of rifles used in the attack that claimed 14 lives.
Farook was allegedly plotting an attack on an unknown location in 2012 but scuttled the plan after the arrests of three men in California and a terror ringleader in Afghanistan in November 2012. Farook and Malik were killed hours later in a shootout with police, leaving behind a 6-month-old daughter. He declined to discuss what time of day the leads indicated they may have been there.
Meanwhile, the U.S. State Department is investigating whether it missed any signs of the radicalization of Malik’s Islamic beliefs when officials in Pakistan scrutinized her request for what is known as a fiance visa, to enter the U.S. with the intent to marry Farook a short time later. “I have no idea”, he said.
Rep. Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said Malik was subjected to an in-person interview during the application process for a visa.
Schiff also said it’s too early to conclude if law enforcement should have caught the plan earlier through surveillance.
While the militant group has since embraced the couple as among its followers, US government sources have said there was no evidence Islamic State even knew of the couple before the San Bernardino killings.
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Workers at the range did not recall having seen Farook before that, Galletta said. “We still don’t have a complete picture”.
