How did San Bernardino’s killer couple Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik become radicalised?
The FBI is looking at the dynamic between the shooters, who a couple of years ago did not even know each other but wound up killing 14 people at a holiday party.
Syed Rizwan Farook, Chicago-born, a college graduate working steadily in Southern California, was a quiet and devout man who went in search of a wife. He eventually found one, a woman named Tashfeen Malik who lived in a distant land and had never been to America.
What happened next – and the question of how and why a suburban couple with a new baby decided to become mass murderers – is the subject of a frantic global terrorism investigation that includes Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and San Bernardino, California.
The FBI is looking at the dynamic between Farook and Malik, who a couple of years ago did not even know each other but wound up dead on a San Bernardino street, riddled with bullets after they had killed 14 people at a holiday party and wounded 21 others.
Did he lead her down the path of radicalisation? Or did she lead him? Did they have direct ties with the Islamic State or other international terrorists, acting as part of an elaborate conspiracy, or were they a freelance operation drawing only inspiration from abroad?
A senior US law enforcement official said one possibility is that Malik was already radicalised before she came to the United States last year as Farook’s new bride.
“Was she the hit, or was he already headed down that road?” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation.
Malik became so religious, so serious and so focused on Islamic teachings, and she lost her interest in her studies