SAN BERNARDINO FBI divers re-entered the waters of Seccombe Lake today as they continued their investigation into the deadly mass shooting at the Inland Regional Center that killed 14 people last week.
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Investigators have been looking into the relationship between Farook, who was killed with his wife in a shootout with police a few hours after their assault, and Enrique Marquez, a boyhood friend.
FBI Director James Comey has said Malik and Farook declared at about the time of their attack that they were acting on behalf of Islamic State, which in turn has embraced the couple as among its followers. The dive teams want to see when they kept anything at the pond or left, the senior official said.
Investigators have focused on trying to determine whether the 2014 marriage between Farook and Malik was genuine.
Comey elaborated a bit on the conversations between Farook and Malik, where they talked to each other about jihad and martyrdom before they were married and before Malik immigrated to the United States.
The search began Thursday after authorities learned the shooters, Syed Rizwan Farook, 28, and Tashfeen Malik, 29, may have been in the area the day of the attack, said David Bowdich, chief of the FBI’s Los Angeles office.
The timing of Marquez and Farook’s possible plot is significant because Marquez legally purchased the two rifles used in the San Bernardino attack around the same time: one in 2011 and the other in early 2012.
On Thursday, a San Bernardino lake was also scoured for electronic items and a hard drive, that the couple was hoping to destroy, was found. Still, the Federal Bureau of Investigation will continue the search in the upcoming days, continuing with the whole neighborhood, after receiving a tip that the two shooters may have visited on the day of the attack.
A brother of Enrique Marquez collects his mail Wednesday, Dec. 9, 2015, in Riverside, Calif. Authorities have said Enrique Marquez, an old friend of San Bernardino attacker Syed Farook, purchased two assault rifles used in last…
The FBI also revealed investigators were looking into any connections there may have been between one of the two killers in San Bernardino last week and four men arrested in 2012 in a separate federal terrorism case brought in nearby Riverside, California. Farook was in the social circle of Kabir, officials told CNN.
Comey said the precise origins of the couple’s radicalisation were as yet unknown but appeared to predate the rise of Islamic State, the militant group that has seized vast swaths of Iraq and Syria and last month claimed responsibility for the assaults on Paris that left 130 dead.
Marquez and Farook had plotted a terrorist attack together back in 2012, ABC News reports.
The FBI raided Marquez’s home last week. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said there’s “certainly nothing early in the investigation” suggesting there was “a tie to others”.
He said FBI investigators had met with the families and victims, adding that many may never recover from their physical and emotional scars.
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Farook traveled to Saudi Arabia in 2013 for the Hajj for a couple of weeks, two government officials said. Marquez has not been charged with a crime.
