US House to take action on terrorism financing
US House to take action on terrorism financing
Islamic militant groups ignored contact attempts from Pakistan-born Tashfeen Malik in the months before she and her husband killed 14 people at a California holiday party, probably because they feared getting caught in a US law enforcement sting, US government sources said on Thursday.
Disclosures of her overtures to extremists abroad surfaced as the investigation of the December 2 shooting rampage in San Bernardino, about 100 km east of Los Angeles, took a new turn with divers searching a small lake near the scene of the massacre.
The number of organisations that Malik, 29, tried to contact and how she sought to reach them were unclear, but the groups almost certainly included Al Qaeda’s Syria-based official affiliate, the Nusrah Front, the government sources said.
One source said investigators have little, if any, evidence that Malik or her husband, Syed Rizwan Farook, 28, had any direct contact with the Islamic State (ISIS), which has seized control of large swaths of Syria and Iraq and claimed responsibility for assaults in Paris last month that left 130 people dead.
FBI director James Comey has said Malik and Farook declared at about the time of their attack that they were acting on behalf of the ISIS, which in turn has embraced the couple as among its followers.
On Thursday a team of divers from the FBI and San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department began searching the waters of Seccombe Lake Park, about four km north of the Inland Regional Centre, seeking additional clues in the mass shooting.
The search of the lake, which could last for days, stemmed from an unspecified lead “indicating that the subjects came into this area” on the day of the attack, said David Bowdich, assistant director in charge of the FBI’s Los Angeles field office.
Meanwhile, federal legislators will takeup legislation on terrorism financing in the first months of 2016, as last week’s shootings in California move them to act quickly, the chairman of a major US House of Representatives committee told reporters on Thursday. The bill will be introduced “fairly early next year”.
