WASHINGTON (AP) — The two San Bernardino shooters were radicalized at least two years ago — well before one of them came to the U.S. on a fiancée visa — and had discussed jihad and martyrdom as early as 2013, FBI Director James Comey said Wednesday in providing the most specific details to date about the couple's path toward extremism.
Investigators now believe that Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, embraced radical Islamic ideology even before they had begun their online relationship and that Malik held extremist views before she arrived in the U.S. last year.
Though the FBI believes the pair was inspired in part by Islamic State ideology — Malik pledged allegiance to the group's leader in a Facebook post around the time of last week's massacre — agents are still looking for other motivations and sources of radicalization, especially because the couple's interest in extremism predates the terror group's emergence as a household name, Comey told the Senate Judiciary Committee.
"ISIL inspiration may well have been part of this, but these two killers were staring to radicalize towards martyrdom and jihad as early as 2013," said the FBI director, using an acronym for the Islamic State.
Comey described the couple as an example of homegrown violent extremists who appear to have radicalized "in place," drawing a distinction between the San Bernardino attack and the one last month in Paris that officials suspect involved planning and training in Syria.
Though Comey declined to answer questions about whether encrypted communication had been used before the attack, he did use the appearance to reiterate his longstanding concerns that criminals, terrorists and spies can use encryption applications on their smartphones to evade detection from law enforcement.
