Probe for shooters’ hard drive continues in California lake

Authorities have ended their search at Seccombe Lake Park for evidence in the San Bernardino shooting. Investigators said they believe that the couple stopped at the lake some point after they committed the shooting attack possibly disposing of evidence to cover their digital trail.

“That assumes, and this investigation is still under way, that there were flags that were raised or should have been raised in the process of her admission to the United States, and I am not prepared to say that and I’m not prepared to make that declaration”, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said Monday.

Divers have completed their search of a California lake that was combed for possible evidence from the San Bernardino shooters.

A search for a computer hard drive and anything else linked to the husband-and-wife shooters who killed 14 people in the attacks in San Bernardino, California, is continuing this weekend.

FBI Los Angeles Laura Eimiller told The Press Enterprise that the divers had finished their search and would not return Sunday.

In addition, agents have recovered two smashed cellphones from a dumpster, and are examining those and other items from the couple’s Redlands home at the FBI’s crime lab in Quantico, Va.

But several federal law enforcement officials said in interviews Friday and Saturday that they also most likely were in direct contact with one or more foreign terror operations, either together as a couple or individually.

Authorities say Farook and Malik, who came to the USA on a fiancee visa in July 2014 and married her husband the next month, were not known to law enforcement before the shootings.

Comey also has noted that the couple sent a joint digital message pledging their allegiance to the Islamic State on the day of the San Bernardino attacks, either just before or after they entered the holiday meeting in camouflage with guns blazing.

Farook asked Marquez to buy the rifles because he was anxious he would not pass the background check himself, the report said.

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

Idaho Senator Jim Risch, a Republican who sits on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said they had an actual plan, including buying weapons, but became apprehensive and shelved it because of law enforcement activity and arrests in the area.

Funerals for three victims, Tin Nguyen, 31, Shannon Johnson, 45, and Isaac Amanios, 60, were held on Saturday. Hundreds of mourners packed a church near Orange County’s Little Saigon to remember Tin Nguyen.

On Friday, a fire that appeared to have been intentionally set burned the entrance to a mosque in Southern California’s Coachella Valley, some 75 miles from San Bernardino.