FBI investigating potential 2012 terror plot by San Bernardino attacker
Source: Wash. Post
The FBI is investigating whether Syed Rizwan Farook and a neighbor intended to commit an act of terror in about 2012 and then got spooked, a senior law enforcement official said Wednesday. The two men may have been disrupted when the FBI arrested several men in late 2012 in a separate plot to kill Americans in Afghanistan.
In addition, Farook and his wife, who killed 14 people in San Bernardino last week, had discussed jihad at least two years before they opened fire in California, the FBI director said Wednesday.
The husband-and-wife duo “were radicalized for quite a long time before their attack,” FBI Director James B. Comey said during an appearance on Capitol Hill. This follows earlier statements by investigators that the shooters had both been adherents to a radical strain of Islam long before the massacre.
Farook, a 28-year-old county health inspector, and his Pakistani wife, Tashfeen Malik, 29, had begun communicating online, Comey said. It was during these communications that they began discussing jihadist thoughts, long before Malik traveled to the United States and they got married.
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2015/12/09/san-bernardino-attackers-talked-about-jihad-and-martyrdom-in-2013/