SITE INTEL GROUP-San Bernardino attacker pledged allegiance to Islamic State leader, officials say - The Washington Post
Police in San Bernardino, Calif., held a news conference about the ongoing investigation into the mass shooting that occurred at a county holiday party on Wednesday. An investigation into the shooters' home uncovered 12 pipe bombs in the building. (Reuters)
The Pakistani woman who teamed with her husband in the San Bernardino massacre that killed 14 people on Wednesday pledged her allegiance to the leader of the Islamic State, the clearest indication yet that the mass shooting was an act of terrorism, according to two law enforcement officials.
The revelation brought a new focus to Tashfeen Malik, 27, the enigmatic woman who police say carried out the killing spree on Wednesday alongside her husband, Syed Rizwan Farook, 28, before they were both slain in a frenzied shootout with officers later that day.
Malik posted a statement on Facebook referring to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the emir of the self-proclaimed Islamic State, the militant group that says it has established a caliphate in Syria and Iraq.
The precise nature of the statement and how she pledged allegiance was not immediately known. Facebook identified and removed the profile involved for violating its community standards, saying that any content praising an Islamic State leader would violate its community standards, a company official said Friday. The company said it was cooperating with law enforcement.
The Islamic State has quickly asserted responsibility for last month’s massacre in Paris and other attacks, but the group does not appear so far to have taken credit for the San Bernardino attacks, so it was unclear if the attack was inspired by the group or specifically directed in some way.
Even as this authorities continued to try and sift through the couple’s past to determine their motives, cable news networks on Friday showed journalists inside their home. Footage broadcast on MSNBC beamed out images of a baby’s crib, personal photographs, children’s toys and shredded paper, even as it was unclear if law enforcement officials still considered the home part of the investigation.
Police said that the two attackers in San Bernardino had a massive arsenal of explosives and ammunition in their home, which officials say suggested a degree of planning and raised the possibility of further bloodshed. They sought to cover their tracks by damaging some of their personal electronic devices, a senior U.S. law enforcement official said Friday, equipment that an FBI lab was analyzing to see if any data could be retrieved.
Authorities still believe the plot was limited to the two attackers, a senior U.S. law enforcement official said, but they are still investigating whether anyone else had any knowledge of the attack.
The FBI is now trying to determine if the two were self-radicalized or were more directly connected to international terrorists as part of a carefully planned operation. Investigators said the couple managed to stay off the FBI radar, and apparently didn’t take any overt steps to make contact with Islamic State operatives living overseas.
“This is not Jihad 101,” the senior law enforcement said, saying that the attackers had not taken the usual steps commonly seen in previous terrorist attacks. Other attackers or people accused of trying to travel overseas seeking training have made contact with terrorists through social media. In some cases, supporters of the Islamic State have shared the group’s propaganda.
The Islamic State uses sophisticated propaganda to recruit adherents and has called for lone-wolf attacks in the United States and other countries, something U.S. officials have called an immediate danger.
Saudi intelligence is investigating Malik’s time in that country, and the government there has not confirmed when she lived there or whether she left with Farook when he visited for nine days in the early summer of 2014.
But a Saudi official said that Malik’s name does not appear on any watch list there, and that they have uncovered no evidence of contacts between her and and radical individual or group during her time there. The official said that Malik had lived with her father “off and on” in Saudi Arabia over the years, apparently travelling back and forth an undetermined number of times to Pakistan.
Since the massacre Wednesday — which also wounded 21 people — officials had been scrambling to determine whether they were looking at a terrorist attack or an extremely unusual and lethal case of workplace violence
Farook had maintained a Facebook page that was deleted before the shooting, according to Rita Katz, executive director of the SITE Intelligence Group, which tracks terrorists’ online communications.
[After Paris and California attacks, U.S. Muslims feel intense backlash]
Police said they had found a number of items — including thumb drives, computers and cellphones — that were being analyzed to investigate the couple’s digital trail.
However, the attackers sought to destroy some of the devices, smashing some into little pieces, according to the senior law enforcement official, who spoke Friday on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation.
The official did not elaborate Friday on the specific types of devices that were destroyed. But because some of the items recovered by law enforcement were broken up into pieces, it was unclear how much could be recovered from the devices themselves, the official said.
The FBI is still trying to determine when the devices were smashed and has not concluded if they were damaged before the shooting or during the hours between the massacre and the bloody firefight with police that ended with both attackers dead on a residential street in San Bernardino.
Farook was a county health worker born in Chicago, while Malik had originally entered the United States on a visa. The young husband and wife had a daughter just six months ago; .Farhan Khan, the brother-in-law of one of the attackers, told NBC News that he was beginning the legal process to adopt the couple’s daughter.
In the days after the attack, investigators found no outward sign of Islamist radicalization, psychological distress or a desire for mayhem.
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The official said the FBI had been perplexed in the days after the attack and was still searching for clues that would indicate radicalization on the part of either one.
This official had said the attack in San Bernardino evoked the mass shooting in Chattanooga, Tenn., earlier this year, when 24-year-old Mohammad Youssef Abdulazeez opened fire at an armed forces recruiting center and a Navy Reserve center, killing five people. In that case, the official pointed out, it took days for the FBI to sort out what had happened, and some questions remain unanswered.
The FBI, which has authority to investigate potential terrorism, said Thursday that it had taken over the investigation, as authorities carefully picked through three crime scenes: the Inland Regional Center, where the mass shooting occurred; the San Bernardino street where the couple died in the gun battle with police; and the couple’s rented home in Redlands, Calif., where robots had helped investigators root out an arsenal of pipe bombs and thousands of bullets.
After the mass shooting in San Bernardino, Calif., on Wednesday that left 14 people dead, details are starting to emerge about the two shooters. Here's what we know about Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik. (The Washington Post)
Some evidence collected in California was flown across the country on Thursday so that the FBI could examine it in its lab, David Bowdich, assistant director in charge of the FBI’s Los Angeles office, said at a news conference.
“We’re hoping some of that digital media … will help us,” he said.
The FBI’s Operational Technology Division in Quantico, Va., has units that can try to retrieve data from smashed, burned and damaged devices, including cellphones, hard drives and flash drives.
A computer analysis team there can look to pull call records, pictures, GPS location data, address book information and other data from the devices, while a forensic analysis unit tries to restore and enhance audio and visual data. Any data that is pulled would go to analysts in the various units investigating the shooting.
Farook, who had a college degree in environmental health and a steady job as a health inspector, traveled to Saudi Arabia and Pakistan last year and returned with Malik, whom he had met online. They were married in the United States, police said.
Authorities have said the two were not on any watch lists. A senior U.S. law enforcement official said that Farook was in contact with persons of interest with possible ties to terrorism but that these were not “substantial” contacts.
Farook had been with his colleagues at the party earlier in the morning before the attack, police said. Authorities could not say conclusively whether there had been a dispute that led Farook to leave the party. But police said a survivor of the shooting told them that Farook slipped away before the massacre.
Farook’s supervisor, Amanda Adair, who also went to college with him at California State University at San Bernardino, said he “got along with everybody, but he kept his distance.” She said that she “can’t imagine [the shooting] was about work” and that she had no inkling that Farook had the capacity for such violence.
Without a firmly established motive, authorities had previously said that they could not determine whether they were dealing with terrorists, a disgruntled worker who had enlisted his wife in his cause, or some kind of hybrid of those two scenarios.
The case did not initially fit any familiar template. If it was terrorism, why would the shooters target co-workers in a small city not far from Los Angeles, rather than some more spectacular target? If it was workplace violence, why build up an arsenal of bullets and pipe bombs?
[“I’ve never witnessed something so sad in my life': Stories of the San Bernardino victims]
“It is possible this was terrorist-related, but we don’t know,” President Obama said Thursday in somber remarks in the Oval Office. “It is also possible this was workplace-related.”
Mark Pitcavage, director of the Center on Extremism for the Anti-Defamation League, said that “based on what is known now about the case, it certainly is unusual and does not fit neatly into any of the traditional models of violence that we’re familiar with.”
Police said Farook and Malik were dressed in tactical gear and armed with rifles, handguns and multiple ammunition magazines when, at about 11 a.m., they strode into a conference room where about 80 people were gathered for a staff training session that was transitioning into a holiday party.
They opened fire, spraying 65 to 75 rounds and hitting more than a third of the people. A bullet struck a sprinkler head, and the sprinklers began soaking the room as the fire alarms went off. The shooters fled in a rented black Ford Expedition, leaving behind a bag with three pipe bombs designed to be triggered with a remote-control device from the SUV. The device malfunctioned.
San Bernardino police Lt. Mike Madden, the first law enforcement officer to arrive at the center, described the fresh scent of gunpowder and a horrifying scene for which years of training had not fully prepared him.
“The situation was surreal,” Madden said Thursday. “It was unspeakable, the carnage we were seeing.”
That tip led police to check Farook’s name, which led to the discovery that he had rented an SUV that matched the description of the getaway car.
Soon, authorities were staking out the couple’s home in Redlands, a suburb 15 minutes to the east. Several hours after the shooting, the SUV rolled by and then sped away, and police chased it.
The SUV stopped on San Bernardino Avenue, a few miles from the massacre. Cellphone videos captured the furious gun battle that followed. Police said the couple fired 76 rifle rounds; police fired 380.
Farook and Malik died at the scene. Two officers were injured, but the wounds were not life-threatening. A third person detained after the shootout was determined to have no involvement in the case.
The SUV, so riddled with bullets that it looked as if it had been hit with a bomb, was due back at the rental agency that day, police said.
Police found more than 1,600 rounds of ammunition on or near the couple, suggesting that they were prepared for a long siege. Police recovered two assault rifles and two 9mm pistols, all legally purchased, according to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Two of the weapons were traced to one of the assailants, said Dannette Seward, an ATF spokeswoman, while the other two were traced to another person who has not been publicly identified.
[The striking difference between the San Bernardino suspects and other mass shooters]
“The FBI is chasing down any contacts these two may have had and whether those contacts are indicative of radicalization or external plotting or are purely incidental,” said Rep. Adam B. Schiff (Calif.), the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee.
The congressman said the shooting did not appear to be “an act of spontaneous workplace violence.” But, he said, it could have been the culmination of a longer-term grievance.
“There appears to be a degree of planning that went into this,” San Bernardino Police Chief Jarrod Burguan said. “Nobody just gets upset at a party, goes home and puts together that kind of elaborate scheme or plan.”
A number of families in this city were shattered by Wednesday’s violence. On Thursday, officials released the names of the 14 people slain at the holiday party. The eight men and six women ranged in age from 26 to 60. One ran the coffee shop in the building. Twelve of the 14 were county employees.
Shaken, too, were Muslims in Southern California. At the Islamic Society of Corona-Norco, Ray Abboud said Muslims were horrified by the shooting. He said he fears people will paint Muslims with one brush.
“It breaks our hearts to see 14 people die,” Abboud said. “We feel sorry for everything that happened, but we can’t blame ourselves for being Muslim.”
He said people in the community were keeping a close watch on their children “to make sure they don’t fall into any crazy stuff.”
Freelance writers Martha Groves and William Dauber in San Bernardino, staff writers Missy Ryan and Eli Saslow in San Bernardino and staff writers Karen DeYoung, Ellen Nakashima, Greg Miller, Brian Murphy, Lindsey Bever, Niraj Chokshi, Ann Gerhart, Sari Horwitz, Elahe Izadi, Wesley Lowery, Eli Saslow, Kevin Sullivan, Julie Tate, Justin Wm. Moyer, Yanan Wang, Sarah Kaplan and Alice Crites in Washington contributed to this report.
[This story has been updated. First published: 9:42 a.m.]
Adam Goldman reports on terrorism and national security for The Washington Post.
Mark Berman is a reporter on the National staff. He runs Post Nation, a destination for breaking news and stories from around the country.
Joel Achenbach writes on science and politics for the Post's national desk and on the "Achenblog."