San Bernardino shooters began plotting attack before their marriage, FBI chief says

LATimes:

FBI Director James Comey said Wednesday that Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, began scheming to carry out a terror attack long before they were engaged and before she moved to the United States on a fiancee visa last year.

Meanwhile, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said Malik may have given false information on her visa application.

“These two killers were radicalized for quite a long time,” Comey told the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday regarding the couple behind last week’s San Bernardino shootings that killed 14 people. “Our investigation to date shows that they were radicalized before they started courting or dating each other online, and as early as the end of 2013, were talking to each other about jihad and martyrdom before they became engaged and married and were living in the U.S.”

Comey added, “We believe they were inspired by foreign organizations. We are working very hard to see if anyone else was involved in assisting, equipping or helping them. And did they have other plans?”

Comey’s announcement about the couple’s past takes the investigation in a new direction, suggesting that Farook, a U.S. citizen, purposely traveled to Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to find a partner to help him carry out what became the worst foreign terrorist attack since Sept. 11, 2001.

Comey acknowledged that the FBI is facing a widening terrorism probe. “It’s ongoing, wide-ranging and [a] very complex case,” he said.

Supporting the concerns were new allegations that Malik gave an incorrect address in Pakistan on her K-1 visa application in what investigators say was an attempt to hide her family’s ties to Islamic militant elements in the Punjab area.

“We now know that Ms. Malik, one of the San Bernardino attackers, arrived in the United States on a fiancée visa,” said Grassley, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. “This is yet another example of the failure of the screening process for those entering the United States. Our government apparently didn’t catch the false address in Pakistan she listed on her application or other possible signs that she was radicalized or an operative.”

But two government sources told The Times that Malik apparently used the name of a neighborhood or street near her home in Pakistan in a ruse to throw off U.S. investigators about her past and family connections.