Syed Farook, the terrorist who launched last week’s attack in San Bernardino with his wife, Tashfeen Malik, was reportedly recruited by a California jihadi who was arrested in 2012 and sentenced this year to 25 years in federal prison.
From CNN:
FBI investigators say they believe San Bernardino shooter Syed Rizwan Farook had ties to one of four Riverside, California, men who were charged in 2012 with planning to join al Qaeda in Afghanistan, two U.S. law enforcement officials said on condition of anonymity Thursday.
The officials said Farook was in the social circle of Sohiel Kabir, who the FBI has said recruited and helped radicalize the other three men in the Riverside group.
Kabir, who was apprehended in Afghanistan in 2012, was sentenced this year to 25 years in prison for his role in the case.
FBI investigators who are probing the San Bernardino shooting are taking a new look at Kabir, the two officials said.
As Breitbart News noted on Wednesday, and as CNN reported earlier, Farook is now suspected of having plotted a terror attack in 2012 with neighbor Enrique Marquez–who is now likely to face indictment in connection with the San Bernardino attack, Fox News reports. The 2012 arrest of four radical Islamists from Southern California apparently caused Farook to drop his plan. Initially, CNN described those arrests as “unrelated,” but now Kabir is thought to have played a role in recruiting Farook.
On Sunday evening, addressing the nation from the Oval Office, President Barack Obama stated: ““So far, we have no evidence that the killers were directed by a terrorist organization overseas, or that they were part of a broader conspiracy here at home.”
If that was true at the time–and there are strong reasons to doubt that claim–it is certainly untrue today, just a few days later.
Photo: file
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