Dive Team Searches Lake Near San Bernardino Mass Shooting Site

According to ABC News, Marquez told FBI investigators that he and Farook plotted a terror attack in 2012, but called off the plans after a series of terror-related arrests in other cities.

He is cooperating with the FBI, but investigators are still trying to corroborate the information he has provided, including details of the alleged 2012 plot.

“We also believe they were inspired by foreign terrorist organizations”, he added.

The account of a possible attack in 2012 came from Mr Enrique Marquez, a long-time friend and former neighbour of Farook’s, according to law enforcement officials who would speak only anonymously.

In a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Wednesday, Sen.

New details emerged Thursday about Enrique Marquez, the man who purchased two of the assault rifles used by the San Bernardino shooters, including that the 24-year-old Riverside man spoke to KTLA in April on an unrelated story.

FBI investigators have pieced together more clues in the lives of Syed Rizwan Farook, a US-born Muslim, and his Pakistani immigrant wife Tashfeen Malik, in an effort to understand why they carried out the mass shooting at a Christmas work party in southern California that killed 14 people and wounded 21 others.

Marquez, who checked himself into a mental hospital after the attack, told investigators that he and Farook were plotting an attack in 2012.

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.

That year, four individuals in Riverside – the same town where Farook and Marquez lived – were arrested and convicted of terrorism. “We’re working very hard to understand exactly their association and the source of their inspiration”.

The husband-and-wife duo “were radicalized for quite a long time before their attack”, he added.

Farook’s association with Kabir raises questions about why the federal government did not have the 28-year-old health inspector on its radar before last week’s massacre. “He told me that he de-converted years ago”.

The FBI said last week that Malik pledged allegiance to the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant on Facebook just before the shooting rampage.

Schiff also said it’s too early to conclude if law enforcement should have caught the plan earlier through surveillance. “That doesn’t appear to be the case”. They were “talking to each other about jihad and martyrdom before they became engaged and married and were living in the US”, he said. “We still don’t have a complete picture”.