California shooters spoke of jihad as early as late 2013: Federal Bureau of Investigation director

“He has admitted that in 2012 they had something in mind and they didn’t do it because there had been some immediate arrests by the counterterrorism people”, Risch, who sits on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, told CNN. Officials caution that Marquez’s claim of a 2012 attack could turn out to be false and an attempt to deflect his role in helping buy weapons that Farook later used in the San Bernardino attack last week.

The investigation of the San Bernardino, California, shooting also is looking at the relationship between Farook and his childhood friend Enrique Marquez. Since the shootings, he has waived his Miranda rights, cooperated with investigators and provided information, according to the officials.

His neighbors there said they were shocked this week when authorities revealed that Marquez had supplied the guns used by Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, in their shooting spree at a holiday party for San Bernardino County employees that left 14 dead and 21 injured.

He said: “If we’re to succeed in defeating terrorism, we must enlist Muslim communities as some of our strongest allies, rather than push them away through suspicion and hate”.

FBI Assistant Director David Bowdich was tight-lipped when asked about his status in the investigation at a news conference earlier this week. Marquez was married previous year with Farook’s brother as a witness.

Marquez’s mother, Armida Chacon, sobbed as she told reporters Thursday that her son is a normal 24-year-old and a good person who loved to hang out with friends and go to parties, according to The Los Angeles Times.

But others who have seen the visa application think that she might have simply used the name of her former neighborhood or street address in Pakistan – either to get around being exposed because of her family ties to militant groups or because she simply was confused about the application form.

A law-enforcement official said the Federal Bureau of Investigation is still looking into how and when Farook and Malik became radicalized, and who influenced whom, but “it’s looking like they were on the same path at the same time”.

They’re carried out by “lunatic fringes of all stripes” that find like-minded cohorts on the Internet, he said. Agents ultimately forced entry through the garage.

Even as funerals are arranged for the victims, law enforcement officials are still digging into the backgrounds of the killer couple. He had worked at Wal-Mart since May but has since been fired, spokesman Brian Nick said.

“People presume there’s a backlash, we have seen the opposite”, Khan said.

But finding such homegrown violent extremists is a “very hard thing”, Comey said. She did not associate with Marquez outside of work, she said.

“We are devastated about what happened, and are still processing this nightmare”, her family said in a statement to ABC News shortly after the shooting.

Another neighbor, Freddy Escamilla, said he’d recently run into Marquez on the street and that he was typically subdued, nodding hello but not saying much. “He never really talked about her or brought her around, but it just didn’t seem like it was going in a positive direction”. Gasser Shehati, a friend of Farook’s from a San Bernardino mosque, said Farook told him several years ago that Marquez had converted to Islam.

Marquez attended sermons by himself but stopped coming about two years ago.

While evidence shows that the couple was “at least in part inspired” by the Islamic State, Comey said officials had not ruled out other sources of inspiration in part because the radicalization process took place before the terror group had become the global presence that it is today.