San Bernardino shooter sought guns from friend to avoid suspicion

FBI investigators on Friday recovered several items from a San Bernardino lake as they looked for electronics and other items left by the shooters in the most deadly terrorist attack on US soil since 9/11, according to law enforcement sources.

“We need to make certain, given the new circumstances that we’re facing, that there is no potential loophole whatsoever”, Kerry said.

The San Bernardino attack, and a massacre in Paris last month that killed 130, have thrust the issue to the forefront of the race for the Republican presidential nomination and prompted President Barack Obama to outline his strategy in a televised address earlier this week.

Investigators don’t believe anything unsafe is at the park, said David Bowdich, assistant director in charge of the Los Angeles Field Office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation during a press conference Thursday afternoon.

Farook, 28, a public health inspector, and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, 29, used the guns to ambush his colleagues December 2 at what was supposed to be a festive annual meeting of county employees, killing 14 people and wounding 21. Before the shooting, the couple pledged allegiance to the Islamic State group, also known as ISIS or ISIL.

The couple’s motives remain unclear.

California Democrats are aggressively calling for gun control measures in the wake of the shootings, and they demanded Thursday that a lifting of the ban on research into gun violence be included in a spending bill needed to keep the government from shutting down after Friday. Their two co-defendants pleaded guilty in the case. Farook was in the social circle of Kabir, officials told CNN. Two members of Farook’s family, but not Syed Farook, attended the same mosque, the person said. He stressed the four Riverside defendants were never accused of planning attacks within the United States.

Even so, the fact she received a visa despite having earlier discussed jihad and martyrdom has led to scrutiny of the visa system.

Marquez, whose security guard license in California expired a year ago, had worked at Wal-Mart since May, but has since been fired, spokesman Brian Nick said. At that location, several neighbors said they saw the residents moving large boxes and furniture out and into SUVs a week before the shootings.

Among the materials Johnson requested are any communications unearthed by investigators pointing to the couple’s plans for the massacre, how they concealed their intentions from law enforcement and any other attacks they might have contemplated.

“The reason it’s changed now is because it’s in our neighborhood”, she said.

“The current impression is that these two people were acting alone”, U.S. Senator Angus King of ME told CNN after the briefing. Investigators found evidence Farook and Malik destroyed their mobile phones the day before the shootings. Richard Burr of North Carolina, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Comey has said Farook had been in communication with individuals who were being scrutinized by the FBI in terrorism investigations, but that the contact he had was not enough to bring him onto the law enforcement radar.

“The only way you’re going to find out this in advance is to do the same type of 24/7 surveillance that was done in Italian-American communities when they were going after the Mafia and in the Irish communities when they were going after the Westies”, he said, a reference to an Irish-American gang active on New York City’s West Side.

On Thursday, one of the federal government sources told The Times that in 2011 or 2012 Farook asked his friend and neighbor, Enrique Marquez, to buy two military-style rifles used in the attacks because he feared he “wouldn’t pass a background check” if he attempted to acquire the weapons on his own.

One of the two people, a law enforcement official briefed on the investigation, says Marquez has told investigators that he and Farook planned an attack in the United States in 2012 but abandoned the idea.