Woman in shooting pledged allegiance to IS
Published 12:51 pm Saturday, December 5, 2015
SAN BERNARDINO, Calif. — The woman who carried out the San Bernardino massacre with her husband had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State group and its leader on Facebook, a U.S. law enforcement official said Friday, providing the strongest evidence to date that the rampage may have been a terrorist attack.
The official said Tashfeen Malik made her posts under an alias and deleted them before she and husband, Syed Farook, killed 14 people Wednesday at a holiday party for his co-workers. The Muslim couple were killed hours later in a fierce gunbattle with police.
Malik, 27, was a Pakistani who came to the U.S. in 2014 on a fiancee visa. Farook, a 28-year-old restaurant health inspector for the county, was born in Chicago to Pakistani parents and raised in Southern California.
Another U.S. official said Malik expressed “admiration” for the extremist group’s leader on Facebook under the alias account. But the official said there was no sign that anyone affiliated with the Islamic State communicated back with her, and there was no evidence of any operational instructions being conveyed to her.
The two officials were not authorized to discuss the case publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.