Thread: Investigators search home of shooter’s former neighbor for a second time

Investigators search home of shooter’s former neighbor for a second time

By Missy Ryan, William Dauber and Tim Craig December 6 at 8:26 PM

SAN BERNARDINO, CALIF. — Law enforcement agents Sunday again searched the home of a man suspected of providing San Bernardino shooter Syed Rizwan Farook with the military-grade rifles he and his wife used to gun down 14 people, expanding the investigation into the deadliest terrorist attack on U.S. soil since Sept. 11, 2001.

A team of three officials spent about 30 minutes inside the home of Enrique Marquez, a former neighbor of Farook, and left carrying a large cardboard box. The box’s contents were unknown, and the officials declined to identify themselves or their agency to reporters outside.

The search at the modest suburban home, the second in two days, took place as new details surfaced about Marquez, who officials say bought the DPMS and Smith & Wesson AR15 rifles that Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, used in the Dec. 2 rampage.

Marquez, who works as a Walmart security guard, checked himself into a mental health facility on Friday; it is not yet clear if he has already been questioned by authorities or if he will be charged.

Four days after the attack on a gathering of county health workers, a picture is slowly emerging of the couple’s past and their apparent radicalization even as their lives followed a seemingly ordinary course: work, marriage, child. The couple’s daughter, born in May, is in the care of child protective services.

Friends and family described Farook, who was born in Illinois and grew up in California, as devout and conservative. Those who prayed with him at local mosques said the 28-year-old spoke about his personal life to few people.

On Sunday, Italian publication La Stampa published an interview with Farook’s father, also named Syed, in which he said his son had harbored anti-Semitic animosity.

Reached at his son Raheel’s home on Sunday morning, the elder Farook said his views differed from those of his son.

“He was going towards [conservatism],” he told reporters through the gate of the home. “His views were conservative, my views were liberal.”

He also said that Syed Farook had quarreled with a Jewish coworker. One of the fellow county health inspectors killed in the attack was Nicholas Thalasinos, who converted to the Messianic Jewish movement of Christianity three years ago and who frequently posted online about Israel and politics.

Kuuleme Stephens, a friend of Thalasinos, said she had spoken with him by phone about two weeks before the attack, reaching him when he was having a conversation with Farook about the nature of Islam and Israel’s place in the Middle East.

But she downplayed the significance of the conversation.

“It wasn’t an argument,” she said. “No one was raising their voices.”

Investigators are also working to determine what other attacks the couple may have planned. The rifles they used had been altered to make them more lethal, and a major arsenal was found in their two-story townhome, including 12 pipe bombs and thousands of rounds of ammunition.

During an appearance on Fox News on Sunday, Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Tex.), chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, said investigators are trying to determine where the couple got the money to buy their weaponry.

“There’s a serious investigation ongoing into what she was doing in Pakistan and in Saudi,” McCaul said. “We think that she had a lot to do with the radicalization process and perhaps with Mr. Farook’s radicalization from within the United States.”

“The wild card here is the wife, Malik,” he added.

One of the few known clues about Malik’s beliefs was a posting she made on Facebook around the time of the attack, pledging loyalty to Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

The Islamic State has described the couple as followers but has not expressed the same close association with the attack that it has with other recent examples of violence, such as the Nov. 13 attacks in Paris.

On Sunday, Pakistani Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan told reporters that his government was investigating Malik’s past. He said Pakistan was offering the United States “all possible legal assistance,” but added that Pakistan should not be held responsible for the actions of a single person.

“Such heinous acts also lead to serious difficulties for millions of Muslims who live in Western and other countries, and the extremists and nationalist elements in those societies look at Muslims with suspicions,” he said.

So far, the Pakistani government has not found any links between the 29-year-old Malik, who was born in Pakistan, and extremist groups, he said.

Reporters’ ability to look into Malik’s roots was made more difficult by the presence of intelligence agents at sites she is known to have visited in the town of Multan, where she lived with her mother and sister while undertaking her university studies. The family moved in 2014, one neighbor said.

On Sunday, three professors at Bahauddin Zakariya University, which Malik also attended, told Reuters that security agencies had told them not to speak to reporters.

A professor, who was not identified, told Reuters that security officials had removed records and pictures of Tashfeen from the university Saturday.

A former college roommate, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter, said she stayed in touch with Malik after she moved to the United States in the summer of 2014, but gradually lost touch.

“She was initially responding to our calls and Facebook messages,” the woman said in a text message. “But then [she] stopped replying to our messages after December 2014.”

A local cleric, Attaul Manan, who runs a madrassa and mosque near Malik’s former home, said the Malik family largely stayed to themselves. “The people have been discussing how [Malik] had lived there, but no one ever saw her because the Malik family did not mix with others in the street,” he said.

But even the most basic facts of Malik’s background remain disputed. While Pakistani officials say she lived in Saudi Arabia on and off for 25 years, the Saudi government on Sunday said she had spent little time there.

According to the Associated Press, Saudi Interior Ministry spokesman Maj. Gen. Mansour al-Turki said she had spent less than six months there in two visits in 2008 and 2013.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world...43c_story.html

Friend of San Bernardino shooter entered mental hospital after attack

Richard A. Serrano, Richard Winton, Joseph Tanfani and Sarah Parvini Contact Reporters

A friend of one of the San Bernardino shooters entered a mental hospital after the attacks, while investigators probed whether he provided two of the weapons recovered after the massacre, according to two law enforcement sources.

Federal authorities interviewed Enrique Marquez of Riverside over the weekend after discovering that he had given the assailants two semiautomatic weapons.

A source said there was no indication at this time that Marquez had any knowledge of the plot.

On Sunday, the FBI seized items from Marquez's home after having spent several hours there the day before, according to neighbors.

The agency had previously issued a confidential All Points Bulletin to local and federal authorities for Marquez.

Investigators are trying to determine whether the friend purchased the weapons used in the massacre that left 14 dead and 21 injured, according to a law enforcement source.

Federal authorities continued to scour the backgrounds of the assailants -- Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife, Tafsheen Malik -- in the shootings to determine what sparked their radical turn and whether they received any outside financial support to carry out the deadliest terrorist attack on U.S. soil since 9/11. The married couple died in the shootout.


Timeline: The San Bernardino shooting and aftermath step by step

U.S. Atty. Gen. Loretta Lynchsaid Sunday investigators have conducted more than 300 interviews and had gained the cooperation of foreign governments, including Pakistan, as part of the far-reaching probe of Farook and Malik, a Pakistani national. The interior minister of Pakistan, where Malik attended college and Farook's parents were born, also announced the country had launched its own inquiry.

As the investigation unfolded, friends and family of the shooters came forward to offer snapshots that may point to what motivated Wednesday's rampage that killed 14 and wounded 21, including Farook's apparent fixation on Israel and Malik's devotion to a fundamentalist strain of Islam.

Lynch, speaking on NBC's "Meet the Press," cautioned against drawing conclusions about the couple and said the probe was a "marathon" effort to chart all aspects of their lives.

"We are trying to learn everything we can about both of these individuals," Lynch said. "We are trying to run everything to ground."

Federal officials have said the couple's plot appeared to be inspired, but not directed, by foreign terrorist organizations. President Obama said in a Sunday evening address that no evidence pointed to the two being part of a "broader conspiracy here at home."

Describing Malik as the "wild card" in the plot, the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas), said investigators were looking into her activities in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.

Malik, 29, was born to a politically influential family in Pakistan's southern Punjab province, moved to Saudi Arabia as a child and returned to Pakistan to begin studying pharmacology in 2007.

FULL COVERAGE: Rampage in San Bernardino >>

Two classmates of Malik at Bahauddin Zakariya University said that while she was enrolled at the college, she also studied at Al Huda, a chain of religious institutes that promote a fundamentalist strain of Islam.

"She used to go to attend sessions in Al Huda almost every day," one of Malik's former classmates told The Times, speaking on condition that she not be identified.

A Pakistani security analyst, Dr. Ayesha Siddiqa, said Al Huda teaches women "fundamentalist" ideas, though it does not necessarily promote a jihadist agenda. Most of the women who attend Al Huda institutes wear a veil and usually come from affluent families like Malik's, Siddiqa and other experts said.

A family member in Pakistan told The Times in an interview that Malik became deeply religious during college and began posting extremist messages on Facebook after arriving in the U.S.

In 2014, she came to the U.S. on a K-1 visa, also called a fiancee visa, with Farook, who worked as an inspector with San Bernardino County.

The limited salary of a county employee has aroused suspicion that the cache of weapons found in the couple's Redlands apartment -- including pipe bombs and ammunition -- may have been purchased with funds from a foreign source, McCaul said.

"I believe on his salary, he was not able to buy this on his own," McCaul said on "Fox News Sunday."

Farook's father told the Italian newspaper La Stampa that his son agreed with the ideology of Islamic State leaders and was "obsessed" with Israel.

But a local activist, speaking alongside one of the family's attorneys, later backtracked and said the elder Farook did not recall the comments he made to the publication.

Hussam Ayloush, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations in the L.A. area, said the father, like the rest of the family, is “dealing with a lot of stress.”

“He’s on medication,” he said. “He doesn’t recall saying that.”

Farook, who grew up in Riverside and has family spread across the Inland Empire, met Malik on a dating website.

The couple were married last year in Islam’s holy city of Mecca in Saudi Arabia, and Saudi officials confirmed that Farook spent nine days in the kingdom in the summer of 2014. In May, the couple’s daughter was born, according to records.

This outwardly normal life masked the couple’s seeming march down the path of radical terrorism.

Farook and Malik had amassed an arsenal of 2,000 9-millimeter rounds, 2,500 .223-caliber rifle rounds and “hundreds of tools” that could have been used to make explosive devices, authorities said.

The couple fired at least 65 shots when they stormed a holiday party at the Inland Regional Center, where about 80 of Farook’s co-workers at the San Bernardino Department of Public Health had gathered. Twelve of the 14 who died and 18 of the 21 injured were county employees, police said.

Hours later, the couple exchanged gunfire with police on San Bernardino streets, in a battle that launched bullets into homes and terrified residents.

http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/l...207-story.html

Friends and family described Farook, who was born in Illinois and grew up in California, as devout and conservative.

Oh these lying propagandists in the media have no shame! I highly doubt that anyone said that this Muslim terrorist was a "conservative"! What a crock of horse hockey.

W

Neighbor who bought guns for terrorists is related to them by marriage

By Yaron Steinbuch

December 9, 2015 | 2:59pm

The former neighbor who supplied the assault-style weapons to the San Bernardino killers is related to them by marriage and recently told a friend that there were Muslims nearby “ready to go haywire,” according to reports.

Enrique Marquez was married last year to Mariya Chernykh, whose sister is the wife of Raheel Farook, brother of mass murderer Syed Rizwan Farook, Reuters reported, citing marriage documents.

Michael G. Stone, a friend of Marquez from the local punk scene, told ABC News that his friend had told him something a few months ago that he now sees in a new light.

“He said something along the lines of, ‘There’s a lot of Muslims in our own back yard, just ready to go haywire and attack,’” Stone said. “And we didn’t think nothing of it. We just brushed it aside, you know. He was drunk, so I don’t know.”

The Farook brothers lived next door to Marquez when they were growing up, though the brothers had both since moved, Reuters reported.

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Enrique MarquezPhoto: Facebook

The marriage documents show that Marquez married Chernykh on Nov. 29, 2014. It could not be determined whether they live together.

Witnesses to the marriage were Mariya’s sister, Tatiana Farook, and Tatiana’s husband, Raheel Farook,Reuters reported.

Raheel Farook married Tatiana, then known as Tatiana Gigliotti, on Sept. 10, 2011, the documents show.
Marquez, described by several neighbors as a good friend of Farook, bought the two .223-caliber rifles legally, according to the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

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Enrique Marquez’s Riverside, Calif., home was raided by federal agents on Dec. 6.Photo: UPI

Employees at a Walmart in Corona, Calif., 20 minutes by car from Riverside, said Marquez has been working there as an asset protection and customer specialist for about six months.

He was last seen there on Nov. 29, they said.

Marquez, who had checked himself into a psychiatric facility after the shooting, was questioned by the feds after they raided his home in Riverside on Saturday. He has not been charged.

http://nypost.com/2015/12/09/neighbo...m-by-marriage/

12/18/15

Enrique Marquez accused of fraud in $200-per-month marriage