{"id":30989,"date":"2015-12-11T09:02:12","date_gmt":"2015-12-11T17:02:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spijue.wpengine.com\/news\/us-officials-search-for-missed-red-flags-ahead-of-shootings\/"},"modified":"2015-12-11T09:02:12","modified_gmt":"2015-12-11T17:02:12","slug":"us-officials-search-for-missed-red-flags-ahead-of-shootings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/news\/us-officials-search-for-missed-red-flags-ahead-of-shootings\/","title":{"rendered":"US officials search for missed red flags ahead of shootings"},"content":{"rendered":"

WASHINGTON<\/strong> \u2014 The U.S. government appears not to have picked up on extremist messages exchanged during the online courtship two years ago between the American-born man accused in the California shootings and his then-fianc\u00e9 in Pakistan, federal officials told Congress during closed-door briefings on Capitol Hill on Thursday.<\/p>\n

American officials say Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, discussed martyrdom and jihad online as early as 2013. But the couple never surfaced on law enforcement\u2019s radar, and Malik was able to enter the U.S. on a fianc\u00e9 visa last year despite having professed radical views online.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, the investigation into the shootings that left 14 dead last week continued in San Bernardino, where an FBI dive team searched a small, urban lake about 3 miles north of the shooting site.<\/p>\n

David Bowdich, chief of the FBI\u2019s Los Angeles office, said investigative leads indicated the shooters had been in the area the day of the massacre and said the search of the lake could take days. He declined to discuss what time of day the leads indicated they may have been there. He also declined to specify what the divers were looking for.<\/p>\n

FBI Director James Comey and other senior American officials briefed members of Congress, who are concerned red flags may have been missed in the last two years.<\/p>\n

\u201cEveryone\u2019s asking the same questions about how it is that law enforcement didn\u2019t know, or intelligence officials didn\u2019t know \u2014 that they could have flown under the radar and nothing gave an indication that they were a threat,\u201d said Rep. Jim Langevin, a Rhode island Democrat and member of the House Homeland Security Committee.<\/p>\n

Rep. Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said Malik was subjected to an in-person interview during the application process for a visa.<\/p>\n

Republican Rep. Will Hurd of Texas, a member of the House Homeland Security Committee, said there\u2019s currently no evidence Malik\u2019s radicalization would have been readily apparent when she was evaluated for a fianc\u00e9 visa.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t think there was missed information,\u201d he said. \u201cIt appears that there was not any evidence that would have been discoverable during an interview for a visa.\u201d<\/p>\n

He declined to discuss what specifically led investigators to conclude that the couple had radicalized independently as early as 2013.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s safe to say that the information about what happened prior to their marriage and to the attacks in San Bernardino was acquired through forensic investigations of these individual lives,\u201d Hurd said.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese people weren\u2019t on the radar,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n

New revelations show a much deeper connection between Farook and Enrique Marquez, his friend who bought the assault rifles used in the shooting, than previously was disclosed. Marquez has not been charged with a crime.<\/p>\n

At least three years ago, Marquez purchased the high-powered weapons that Farook and his wife used to open fire on a holiday gathering of Farook\u2019s fellow health inspectors Dec. 2, killing 14 people. Farook and Malik were killed hours later in a shootout with police, leaving behind a 6-month-old daughter.<\/p>\n

Investigators are trying to determine if Farook\u2019s path toward extremism predated 2013 and whether it led to plans to launch an attack in 2012, according to two people familiar with the investigation who were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.<\/p>\n

Marquez and Farook \u201cwere plotting an actual attack\u201d that year, including buying weapons, but became apprehensive and shelved the plan because of law enforcement activity and arrests in the area, said Idaho Sen. Jim Risch, a Republican who sits on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.<\/p>\n

Marquez spoke with federal authorities after they raided his mother\u2019s Riverside house over the weekend. He and Farook were friends for years and became family last year, with a sister-in-law in common.<\/p>\n

Marquez\u2019s mother, Armida Chacon, sobbed as she told reporters Thursday that her son is a normal 24-year-old and a good person who loved to hang out with friends and go to parties, according to The Los Angeles Times.<\/p>\n

When asked about Farook, she said her son was friends with him and \u201cnothing more.\u201d<\/p>\n

Chacon said she hadn\u2019t seen her son since the day of the shooting.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t know how this happened. … My world is upside-down,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Farook and Marquez were listed as witnesses on the marriage license when Farook\u2019s brother, Raheel, wed a Russian woman in 2011.<\/p>\n

Three years later, Raheel Farook and his wife, Tatiana, were witnesses to Marquez\u2019s marriage to her sister, Mariya Chernykh, according to Riverside County records.<\/p>\n

The ceremony took place at the Islamic Society of Corona-Norco, according to the marriage license, though the mosque\u2019s facility manager denied it occurred there.<\/p>\n

Comey, who testified in the Senate on Wednesday, described Farook and Malik as examples of homegrown violent extremists who appear to have radicalized \u201cin place,\u201d drawing a distinction between the California attack and the one last month in Paris that officials suspect involved planning and training in Syria.<\/p>\n

He said the FBI did not yet know if Farook and Malik\u2019s marriage was arranged by a foreign extremist organization.<\/p>\n

Malik\u2019s father, reached in Jiddah, Saudi Arabia, condemned his daughter\u2019s actions and said he is \u201cvery, very sad. … I am in such pain that I cannot even describe it.\u201d<\/p>\n

The father, Gulzar Ahmed Malik, has been a resident in the kingdom since the early 1980s, the Saudi Interior Ministry said. His daughter was from Pakistan but traveled to Saudi Arabia.<\/p>\n

___<\/p>\n

Associated Press writers Brian Melley, Michael R. Blood and Amanda Lee Myers in Los Angeles, Alicia A. Caldwell in Washington, Asif Shahzad in Islamabad and Brian Skoloff in San Bernardino contributed to this report.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

WASHINGTON \u2014 The U.S. government appears not to have picked up on extremist messages exchanged during the online courtship two years ago between the American-born man accused in the California shootings and his then-fianc\u00e9 in Pakistan, federal officials told Congress during closed-door briefings on Capitol Hill on Thursday. American officials say Syed Rizwan Farook and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":107,"featured_media":30990,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":4,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[65],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-30989","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-nation-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30989","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/107"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30989"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30989\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30990"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30989"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30989"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30989"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=30989"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}