California shooter Malik attended Islamic school in Pakistan

It’s incredible that Farook’s father told the Italian newspaper La Stampa that his son was “fixated” on Israel and supported ISIS’ ideology of establishing an Islamic caliphate in the way that some fathers would describe one of their kids sending a Santa note asking for a pony for Christmas.

Malik is the latest in a string of high-profile college-educated militants of Pakistani origin, including would-be Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad, 9/11 planner Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and “Lady Al-Qaeda” – neuroscientist Aafia Siddiqui, who is now serving an 86-year prison sentence in the USA for attacking American soldiers in Afghanistan.

Al-Huda’s founder, Farhat Hashmi, now living in Canada, has been criticized for promoting a conservative strain of Islam.

The U.S. government has said there was vigorous vetting of her background, including in-person interviews, fingerprints, checks against terrorists watch lists and reviews of her family members, travel history and places where she lived and worked.

Tashfeen Malik, one of the San Bernardino, Calif., shooters, attended classes six days a week for more than a year at Al-Huda’s Pakistan campus, a school spokeswoman told The Associated Press.

According to the Daily Mail Online, the United States officials handed over information to their Pakistani counterparts about links between Tashfeen Malik and the Red Mosque in Islamabad which is notoriously liked to radicalisation of female Muslim students, in a meeting at London.

Malik studied pharmacy at the Bahauddin Zakariya University in the central city of Multan, where she got a degree in 2013.

The organization has mostly attracted middle and upper-class women in Pakistan.

“There is no link between her and extremists in Pakistan”, according to a statement from Pakistan’s Interior Ministry. However, a source told AFP that Malik did not complete her course. “What they understand as the pure Islam is something very, very conservative and fundamentalist”, she said. “We can not be held responsible for personal acts of any of our students”, the statement said. She started the two-year course in mid-April of 2013 to learn about the Quran, its translation and interpretation, but she did not finish her studies before leaving in May 2014.

She said that Malik was an above-average student and dressed conservatively, yet still didn’t stand out by any means.

“We weren’t quite sure if it was an exercise the staff were throwing that they forgot to tell us about”, he said, “but we all reacted instinctively and went under our tables”. Chaudhry said by phone from the southern port city of Karachi, where she is based.

He said the bureau believes both were radicalised and had been “for some time“, though he says the bureau doesn’t know when or how that happened.

Meanwhile, an administration official at the academy in Multan said it could neither confirm nor reject that she had studied there, and that the issue would be discussed with management.

“She was very brilliant, asking questions to the teachers”, Butt said.

On Sunday, three professors at Bahauddin Zakariya University, which Malik attended, said they had been instructed by security agencies not to speak to reporters. Farook legally purchased the two handguns the couple used before he met Malik. It is not clear whether the house, which has been sealed, was owned by Tashfeen or her father.

Tashfeen Malik, the woman accused of carrying out the deadly San Bernardino, California terrorist attack last Wednesday along with her husband, studied at an all-women Islamic religious school in Pakistan before coming to the USA to marry Syed Farook.

Last week, she pledged her allegiance to the Islamic State group and, armed with an assault-style rifle, carried out an attack with her husband on his co-workers that left 14 dead, authorities said.