Investigators don’t believe anything risky is at the park, said David Bowdich, assistant director in charge of the Los Angeles Field Office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation during a press conference Thursday afternoon.
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Investigators say Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik crushed their cell phones.
That year, four individuals in Riverside – the same town where Farook and Marquez lived – were arrested and convicted of terrorism.
Republican Rep. Will Hurd of Texas, a member of the House Homeland Security Committee, stated there’s at present no proof Malik’s radicalization would have been readily obvious when she was evaluated for a fiancée visa.
Marquez has emerged as a person of interest in the San Bernardino shootings because he bought rifles used in the attack.
The militants Malik, 29, tried to contact may have turned her down due to fears that she was actually working with law enforcement, Reuters’ sources said.
Marquez, who converted to Islam around the time he purchased the weapons for Farook, is cooperating with the investigation and told investigators that Farook may have planned an attack in 2011, a plot that went unnoticed by intelligence officials.
Three years later, Raheel Farook and his wife, Tatiana, were witnesses to Marquez’s marriage to her sister, Mariya Chernykh, according to Riverside County records. The FBI is now trying to verify Marquez’s mental stability after he checked himself into a mental facility two days after the attack.
Marquez hasn’t been charged with a crime and has been cooperating with authorities. Farook was in the social circle of Kabir, officials told CNN.
Farook and Malik opened fire at the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino on December 2, killing 14 people and injuring 20 others.
“They were actually radicalized before they started courting or dating each other online, and online as early as the end of 2013, they were talking to each other about jihad and martyrdom before they became engaged and then married and lived together in the United States”, FBI Director James Comey said at a Senate oversight hearing Wednesday.
He said one of the gunmen in last May’s shooting outside a Prophet Mohammed cartoon contest in Garland, Texas had exchanged more than 100 messages prior to the attack that investigators still had been unable to access.
Schiff also said it’s too early to conclude if law enforcement should have caught the plan earlier through surveillance.
The final post on a Facebook page believed to be associated with Malik used the word “we” and pledged allegiance to ISIS, an indication, a USA official said, that it was a statement on behalf of both killers. “That doesn’t appear to be the case”.
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“There was never a danger to this community”, he said. “We still don’t have a complete picture”.
