Search for shooters’ hard drive concludes in California lake

An FBI dive team searches Seccombe Lake for evidence in connection with last week’s fatal shooting at Inland Regional Center, Friday, Dec. 11, 2015, in San Bernardino, Calif. The FBI says divers are searching the lake in a San…

Federal Bureau of Investigation spokeswoman Laura Eimiller said in an email divers retrieved objects from Seccombe Lake, as they did the previous day. The source declined to describe the items found.

One of the items divers were likely looking for was a missing hard drive from the couple’s computer.

Like the 9/11 hijackers who were recruited, trained and financed by foreign terror organizations, were Farook and Malik directed to carry out some kind of an assault before deciding on the Inland Regional Center and killing 14 people in San Bernardino?

The killers were in the area “at some point”, he said, but he did not specify if it was before or after the massacre. It was an office party for the San Bernardino County Public Health Department, where Farook worked as an inspector.

He checked himself in to a mental health facility after the attack and has not been charged with a crime.

In addition, agents have recovered two smashed cellphones from a dumpster, which with other items from the couple’s Redlands home are being examined at the FBI’s crime lab in Quantico, Va. But since the attack they have determined the couple discussed martyrdom and jihad online as early as 2013. In one, he asked whether Farook, Malik or Enrique Marquez – a former Farook neighbor who bought the rifles used in the mass shooting – had ever “been under any investigation or surveillance by US law enforcement or counter-terrorism officials?” Because she was applying for a fiancee visa, the interview primarily sought to prove she knew Farook and really was in a relationship with him.

Monday, the Obama administration is reviewing the plan, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said. But immigration officials do not routinely review social media as part of their background checks, and there is a debate inside the Department of Homeland Security over whether it is even appropriate to do so.

Testifying Wednesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Comey was asked whether a foreign terror network arranged the couple’s introduction and eventual marriage in order for Malik, a Pakistani by birth related to several radical Islamic militants, to enter the United States from Saudi Arabia after Farook, himself self-radicalized, combed the Internet and traveled overseas in search of a wife.

Funerals for the attack’s 14 victims have begun. The Department of State then reviewed her fingerprints against other databases and she was thoroughly reviewed once more after she applied for a green card. We have a number of tools from which we draw this information.

Investigators based that line on inquiry on evidence left behind on Farook and Malik’s computers and digital devices, not all of which the couple were able to destroy before they were killed. Specifically, he was asked whether social media activity should be considered in the vetting process.

In a telephone interview with the Voice of America’s Somali Service, he said he has left Shabab and denied any involvement in San Bernardino. “Clearly, the social media has placed a whole new burden and a whole new set of questions, but not impossible ones to resolve, and I think we need to look at this very, very carefully – which is what we’re doing – before we jump to any wholesale prohibition without understanding what the implications may be”.

Investigators have been seeking the digital trail of communications and planning for the attack.