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 The FBI also revealed investigators were looking into any
connections there may have been between one of the two killers in
San Bernardino last week and four men arrested in 2012 in a separate
federal terrorism case brought in nearby Riverside, California.
Thursday's underwater search stemmed from unspecified leads
indicating the married couple who carried out the shooting spree had
been in the vicinity of Seccombe Lake in San Bernardino on the day
of the killings, said David Bowdich, assistant director of the FBI
field office in Los Angeles.
Bowdich said he would not discuss the “specific evidence we’re
looking for.”
CNN reported investigators were seeking a computer hard drive that
belonged to the couple, who the FBI has said were inspired by
Islamic extremists. Bowdich said investigators already have combed
the surrounding park, and that the search of the lake by FBI and
Sheriff's Department divers could take days.
Seccombe Lake Park lies about 2.5 miles (4 km) north of the Inland
Regional Center, the social services agency where 14 people were
killed and 22 others injured when Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife,
Tashfeen Malik, stormed a holiday gathering of his co-workers there
on Dec. 2 and opened fire with assault rifles.
 Farook, 28, a U.S.-born son of Pakistani immigrants, and Malik, 29,
a Pakistani native he married last year in Saudi Arabia, were slain
hours after their attack in a shootout with police.
The FBI said it is treating the mass shooting as an act of
terrorism, citing the couple's declaration that they were acting on
behalf of the militant group Islamic State, as well as a large cache
of weapons, ammunition and bomb-making materials seized in the
investigation.
The couple's motives remain unclear. But if the crime proves to have
been the work of killers driven by militant Islamic ideology, as the
FBI suspects, it would mark the deadliest such attack on U.S. soil
since Sept. 11, 2011.
The latest slayings and disclosures about the killers' backgrounds
have put law U.S. law enforcement on heightened alert and
reverberated into the U.S. presidential campaign, intensifying
debates over gun control, immigration and national security.
POSSIBLE LINKS TO 2012 PLOT EXAMINED
Speaking to reporters at Seccombe Lake on Thursday, Bowdich
disclosed the FBI was examining whether Farook had any links with
the four conspirators in the Riverside case, as CNN and other media
outlets have reported.
A jury last year convicted two of those men, including Afghan-born
ringleader Sohiel Omar Kabir, of conspiring to provide material
support and resources to al Qaeda and plotting to attack U.S.
military forces in Afghanistan. Their two co-defendants pleaded
guilty in the case.
CNN, citing unnamed officials, reported Farook had been a member of
Kabir’s social circle. Asked whether the FBI knew of any ties
between Farook and the four convicted Riverside conspirators,
Bowdich said: “It would be irresponsible not to investigate.” He
stressed the four Riverside defendants were never accused of
planning attacks within the United States.
FBI Director James Comey told a U.S. Senate committee on Wednesday
that the couple were discovered to have been discussing jihad and
martyrdom online with each other as far back as 2013, a year before
they met in person.
Comey said the precise origins of the couple's radicalization were
as yet unknown but appeared to predate the rise of Islamic State,
the militant group that has seized vast swaths of Iraq and Syria and
last month claimed responsibility for the assaults on Paris that
left 130 dead.
U.S. government sources told Reuters on Thursday that Malik tried in
vain to contact multiple Islamic militant groups in the months
before she and Farook staged their attack, but her overtures were
ignored.
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The organizations Malik sought out likely shied away out of extreme
caution in communicating with individuals unknown to them and a fear
of being caught up in a law-enforcement "sting" operation, sources
said.
The number of organizations that Malik attempted to approach and how
she sought to reach them were unclear, though 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 had any direct contact with Islamic State.
LAWMAKERS BRIEFED
While the militant group has since embraced the couple as among its
followers, U.S. government sources have said there was no evidence
Islamic State even knew of the couple before the San Bernardino
killings.
Comey, along with U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson and
John Mulligan, deputy director of the National Counterterrorism
Center, briefed members of both houses of Congress on Thursday about
the investigation in closed, classified sessions.
"The current impression is that these two people were acting alone,"
U.S. Senator Angus King of Maine told CNN after the briefing. But he
added that he was troubled by the fact that the couple had tried to
cover their tracks by destroying their cell phones and other
electronic equipment.
Representative Bob Goodlatte of Virginia, the Republican chairman of
the House Judiciary Committee, told reporters afterward that there
were people in the community who saw suspicious activity at the
shooters' house but decided not to tell authorities "for a variety
of reasons."
New York Representative Peter King, a senior Republican member of
the House Intelligence Committee, emerged from the session calling
for "more surveillance in the Muslim community here in the United
States."
He drew comparisons to heightened scrutiny law enforcement placed on
Italian-American and Irish-American communities during past
investigations of organized crime.
"You look where the terror is going to come from, and right now, it
is going to come from the Muslim community," he said. "It's a small
percentage, but to me, the only way you find out about it in advance
is having sources and informers on the ground, having constant
surveillance."
Investigators also have been looking into the couple's ties with
Enrique Marquez, a boyhood friend of Farook and Muslim convert who
bought the two rifles used in the attack. A federal law enforcement
source said Marquez and Farook appear to have contemplated some sort
of attack around 2012 but abandoned the idea.
Marquez, who is related to Farook's family by marriage - his wife
and the wife of Farook's older brother are sisters - has not been
charged with any crime.
(Additional reporting by Megan Cassella, Patricia Zengerle, Bill
Trott and Mark Hosenbal in Washington, Dan Whitcomb in Los Angeles
and Edward McAllister in Riverside, California; Writing by Steve
Gorman and by Bill Trott; Editing by Jonathan Oatis, Cynthia
Osterman and Lisa Shumaker)
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