The Pakistani woman suspect in the California mass shooting may have travelled to India from Saudi Arabia once in 2013, a year before she came to the US with her husband, a media report said on Tuesda
The Pakistani woman suspect in the California mass shooting may have travelled to India from Saudi Arabia once in 2013, a year before she came to the US with her husband, a media report said on Tuesday.
Tashfeen Malik had visited Saudi Arabia twice, the New York Times quoted a Saudi interior ministry official as saying. After one of the visits to the kingdom, she had left for India, the report said.
The report quoted Saudi interior ministry spokesm-an Mansour Turki as saying that Malik had arrived in Saudi Arabia in June, 2008 from Pakistan to visit her father and stayed for about nine weeks before returning to Pakistan.
“Then, in 2013, she arrived on June 8, from Pakistan, and departed for India on October 6 of the same year,” Mr Turki was quoted as saying in the NYT report. But there is no further detail about wheth-er Malik had reached India or for how long and where in India she stayed.
Mr Turki said there was “no evidence” that Malik had met her husband, Syed Rizwan Farook, in the kingdom, but they were in Saudi Arabia at the same time for about five days in October 2013. Malik’s husband visited Saudi Arabia twice, once for the Haj pilgrimage in October, 2013, and once for an off-season Umraah pilgrimage for nine days in July, 2014.
American officials reported that the couple flew to the US together from Jeddah in July, 2014.
The NYT report said that according to Malik’s relatives and acquaintances in Pakistan, she had grown up in Saudi Arabia and had been influenced by its deeply conservative interpretation of Islam.
Saudi officials however denied that she spent significant time in the kingdom, saying she visited only twice, for a few months in total.
Malik’s seminary in Pakistan condemned the massacre on Tuesday, saying there is “no space for such acts in the name of Islam”.
Al-Huda, one of the country’s most high-profile religious seminaries for women, on Tuesday rejected any responsibility for the massacre, condemning such acts anywhere in the world. Al-Huda has no known extremist links, though critics accuse it of a Taliban-like ideology.
