The FBI announced Wednesday that the San Bernardino shooters did not openly post on social media about jihad, but did have conversations about martyrdom using “private direct messages”, BBC News reports.
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Dead… Tashfeen Malik, left, and Syed Farook, as they passed through O’Hare International Airport in Chicago. But he emphasized that these communications were private, saying that investigators have not found public social media postings from that time that would have tipped off authorities to the couple’s extremist views. The assailant in that attack, Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez, a naturalized US citizen living in Hixson, Tenn., was killed by police gunfire after he shot and killed four Marines and a sailor and wounded three other people.
Most Muslims in the San Bernardino community refused to attend burial or perform funeral prayer.
The Islamist militant group has “revolutionized” terrorism by seeking to inspire such small-scale attacks, Comey said. He said at this point in the investigation, the agency has determined that early on in their relationship – when they were in contact only over the Internet and had not yet met in person – Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik discussed their mutual support for jihad and martyrdom. “I’ve seen some reporting on that”. Both were killed in a shootout with police shortly after they stormed a county government holiday party in San Bernardino, killing 14.
The head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation now says the San Bernardino terrorists did not post about Jihad on social media.
Citing U.S. law enforcement officials, CNN previously reported that Malik advocated jihad in messages on social media, but her comments were made under a pseudonym and with strict privacy settings that did not allow people outside a small group of friends to see them.
Again, Comey said Wednesday that there weren’t any declarations that were public.
“Your parents’ al-Qaida is a very different model and was a very different threat that what we face today”, he said.
Comey also said the July 16 attack in two military sites Chattanooga, during which five USA service members were killed, was “inspired and motivated by foreign terrorist propaganda”.
“Whether someone, a relative, saw something and failed to report it, I’m not ready to go there yet”, he said.
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“They move from Twitter direct messaging, which we can get access to with lawful probable cause, to a mobile messaging app that is end-to-end encrypted”, Comey said.
