As authorities continue to unravel the lives and plans of the husband and wife duo who launched a private jihad in San Bernardino, California, killing 14 and injuring over 20, the large arsenal they amassed is convincing investigators that the pair planned far more attacks than the single assault that ended in their deaths.
According to wire service Reuters, authorities are becoming convinced that Tashfeen Malik, 29, and her husband, Syed Rizwan Farook, 28, had far more damage in mind than the attack they perpetrated on December 2. No other targets have been identified, Reuters reports, but their arsenal, including a large number of pipe bombs, shows that the couple wanted to do far more damage than they were able to achieve.
Links between the pair and terror groups are still being uncovered. Federal investigators are uncovering communications between both Farook and Malik, showing that they were in contact with terrorists overseas. It has also been learned that the couple were viewing an increasing number of ISIS and terrorist videos online in the weeks leading up to the attack on the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino.
Investigators are still trying to determine which of the pair had become “radicalized” first and just when that occurred, but signs point to Malik, the 29-year-old wife, as the one who was the more radicalized of the pair. Federal authorities are trying to determine her movements in Pakistan when she was in that Muslim-controlled country between 2007 and 2012 ostensibly studying to become a pharmacologist.
“There’s a serious investigation ongoing into what she was doing in Pakistan and in Saudi,” U.S. Congressman Michael McCaul (R-TX) said on “Fox News Sunday,” “including if she attended the red mosque in Islamabad, which is a very radicalized mosque.”
“We think that she had a lot to do with the radicalization process and perhaps with Mr. Farook’s radicalization from within in the United States,” said McCaul, the chair of the House Homeland Security Committee.
Meanwhile, as U.S. investigators try to learn all they can about the lives of the two terrorists in the years leading up to their attack, ISIS mentioned the two, labeling them “followers”
The couple was mentioned in an ISIS-sponsored radio broadcast on December 5.
“Two followers of Islamic State attacked several days ago a center in San Bernardino in California,” the terror group said during its Saturday broadcast.
While authorities are unsure of just how much contact these domestic terrorists had with ISIS or other terror groups, the pair did post comments to Facebook praising ISIS and its jihad.
Finally, despite that early in its investigation the FBI termed the attack an act or terror, the Obama administration refused to make that determination for days after the attack.
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston, or email the author at igcolonel@hotmail.com.
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