While she confirmed that the lake’s search is over, she declined to comment on whether the retrieved items are related to the mass shooting that left 14 people dead. The source declined to describe the items found.
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Divers concluded a search for a hard drive in a lake near the site of the San Bernardino massacre. Investigators believe the hard drive was removed as a way to cover up the crime. The couple died in a shootout with law enforcement hours later, leaving behind a 6-month-old daughter.
Although David Bowdich, the assistant director of the FBI’s Los Angeles office, would not reveal what the search meant to find, he did confirm that the two terrorists were in the area “at some point”, according to CNN.
Farook, a USA citizen, and his Pakistani-born wife, opened fire December 2 at a holiday luncheon attended by many of Farook’s co-workers in the San Bernardino health department.
American law enforcement officials said that they recently discovered those old and previously “unreported” postings as they pieced together the lives of Tashfeen and her husband Syed Rizwan Farook, trying to understand how they pulled off the deadliest attack on American soil since September 11, 2001.
In the aftermath of terrorist attacks in San Bernardino and Paris, this screening process has been singled out as a major vulnerability in the nation’s defense against terrorism.
Marquez, who checked himself into a Long Beach mental hospital after the attack, told investigators that he and Farook were plotting an attack in 2012. The guns were purchased more than three years ago.
All those reviews came back clear, and the F.B.I. has said it had no incriminating information about Ms. Malik or Mr. Farook in its databases.
Her Department of Homeland Security application, which was checked before the interview, was clean, two senior State Department officials said. Then, her application went through to the State Department, which reviewed her fingerprints against other databases and finally, she applied for a green card and was thoroughly reviewed once more.
On the same day, Leon Rodriguez, director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, told lawmakers in the Lower House no interview was required. California marriage records show she married Farook the following month.
Tashfeen Malik, who carried out the San Bernardino massacre along with her husband, reportedly passed three background checks although she openly talked of violent jihad on social media. Immigration officials don’t usually check social media posts as part of their background checks, according to the newspaper. We have a number of tools from which we draw this information. With that issue unresolved, the agency has not regularly been using social media references, federal officials said.
Speaking in Paris on Saturday, Secretary of State John Kerry fielded a question about the visa-vetting process and whether the policies regarding it needed to be updated. Specifically noting that the process did not detect the radicalization.
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“The review has been ordered and we need to look at whether there are means, and whether we should be, and how we can do it”, he said. “That program is at a minimum worth a very close look”.
