World News
FBI Investigators Say California Killers Were Long Time Radicalized Muslims
Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik Federal Bureau of Investigation
CALIFORNIA, USA – The couple Muslim Couple who carried out the deadly attack that killed 14 people here last week had long been radicalized and had been practicing at a target range days before their murder spree, the Federal Bureau of Investigation said Monday.
The characterization of the husband and wife team, Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik, came as F.B.I. investigators were leaning away from the theory that Ms. Malik, who declared allegiance to the Islamic State on Facebook around the time of the attack, had led her American-born husband to the violence.
“As the investigation has progressed, we have learned and believe that both subjects were radicalized and have been for quite some time,” David Bowdich, the F.B.I. assistant director in charge of the Los Angeles field office, said at a news conference here. The authorities said they now had evidence that there was extensive planning for the attack. Mr. Bowdich said the couple honed their shooting skills at ranges across the Los Angeles region, including one near where the attack took place here in San Bernardino County.
Pipes for Bombs and Target Practice
The F.B.I. said both assailants in the California shooting had been radicalized, had considerable material for bombs in their home and had recently had target practice at a shooting range.
“That target practice in one occasion happened within days of this event,” he said.
With the investigation sprawling from California to Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, the exact motives of Mr. Farook, 28, and Ms. Malik, 29, have not been identified. But in recent days a fuller picture of the couple has emerged as the F.B.I. and other American intelligence and law enforcement agencies have gained greater access to their electronics and phone records, and as more interviews have been conducted with family members, friends, co-workers and other associates.
Investigators say they have learned through interviews with people who knew Mr. Farook for several years that he had militant views before he met Ms. Malik online and married her in Saudi Arabia.
“At first it seemed very black and white to us that he changed radically when he met her,” said one of the officials who declined to be identified because of the continuing investigation. “But it’s become clear that he was that way before he met her.”
A memorial outside of the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C., days after a mass shooting there
At the news conference, Mr. Bowdich said that at this point, the authorities did not believe that forces beyond the nation’s borders had been involved in orchestrating the attack.
“I want to be crystal clear here — we do not see any evidence so far of a plot outside the continental U.S.,” he said. “We may find it someday, we may not; we don’t know. But right now we’re looking at these two individuals.”
He said that the F.B.I. had interviewed 400 people, and he asked for patience from the public as the agency seeks to untangle the origins and motivations of the attack on the Inland Regional Center, which also wounded 21 people. He said that the F.B.I. was still building profiles of the suspects and of the people around them. “That takes time,” he said. “This is Day 5.”
After the attack last week, the F.B.I. arrived with a search warrant and took video surveillance footage at the Riverside Magnum Range near San Bernardino, where Mr. Farook practiced firing. John Galletta, a firearms instructor at the range, confirmed that Mr. Farook had visited, but he did not say if he had been coming regularly. Mr. Galletta said he had not seen Mr. Farook’s wife at the range. A fuller portrait of Ms. Malik emerged in Pakistan, where she completed a degree in pharmacology at Bahauddin Zakariya University in Multan.
Ms. Malik also spent a year studying at an Al-Huda center, a conservative religious school for women in Multan, a city in central Pakistan, officials said Monday. Officials at the center said she enrolled in an 18-month course to study the Quran in 2013, just as she completed her degree at Bahauddin Zakariya. But she left before finishing the course, telling administrators she was getting married.
Farrukh Chaudhry, a spokeswoman for Al-Huda, an international chain of religious schools geared toward educated and often affluent women, said that Ms. Malik stopped her studies with the group in May 2014. A few months later, she was granted a K-1 visa, known as a “fiancé visa,” that enabled her to travel to the United States, according to American officials.
Critics in Pakistan have long said that Al-Huda, which urges women to cover their faces and to study the Quran, spreads a more conservative strain of Islam. But it has never been directly linked to jihadist violence.
Still, confirmation that Ms. Malik had studied with the group offers a new clue to the years before she left Pakistan for the United States. At Al-Huda’s office in an upmarket residential neighborhood, a coordinator, Alia Qamar, described her as a typical student.
“She said she was leaving to get married,” said Ms. Qamar, who wore a black niqab that exposed only her eyes. “Had she completed our course, I’m sure nothing like this would have happened.”
Ms. Qamar said she believed Ms. Malik started at the school in 2012. But Ms. Chaudhry, who spoke by phone from Karachi, said that records indicated that Ms. Malik enrolled with Al-Huda on April 17, 2013, and left on May 3, 2014.
Ms. Malik and fellow students studied and interpreted the Quran — a typical line of study at Al-Huda, which focuses heavily on Islamic scripture. “Quran for all; in every hand, every heart,” reads the slogan on the group’s website. Before leaving in May 2014, Ms. Malik had requested information about completing her studies by correspondence, Ms. Chaudhry added. “We sent her the documents by email, but never heard back,” she said.
Al-Huda, founded in 1994, sometimes draws women who turn to the group after their children have grown up, sometimes causing friction in their families as less pious members complain of being pressured to conform with a more conservative family lifestyle.
Tashfeen Malik and Syed Rizwan Farook in Chicago in 2014. U.S. Customs and Border Protection
“They are trained to be activists and reformers, bringing people back to what they call the ‘real’ Islam, true and pure,” said Faiza Mushtaq, an assistant professor of sociology at the Institute of Business Administration in Karachi, whose Ph.D. study focused on Al-Huda.
The group also provides charitable services like education scholarships and a marriage bureau to help religious parents find suitable spouses for their children.
The organization’s founder, Farhat Hashmi, is based in Canada, but she has a large following in Pakistan, which has grown partly through the use of social media. Officials with the group emphasize that while it is conservative, it has no links to violence. Critics largely accept that idea, while countering that the group may foster a dangerously narrow mind-set.
“Religious conservatism and piety are not the only thing institutions like Al-Huda spread,” said Husain Haqqani, a former Pakistani ambassador to the United States now at the Hudson Institute, a think tank in Washington. “Their teachings have a strong dose of ‘Muslims are destined to lead the world’ and ‘the corrupt West must be confronted.’ ”
Still, Al-Huda’s worldview does not explain Ms. Malik’s transformation into a killer, Ms. Mushtaq, the sociologist, said.
“Yes, Al-Huda teaches women to be narrow and doctrinaire,” she said. “But there’s little in the classroom that explains why a woman like Tashfeen Malik would take up arms.”
“Whatever Tashfeen Malik allegedly did is an individual act,” said Ms. Chaudhry, the spokeswoman. “We have nothing to do with it.”
Similar questions were being considered in Southern California, where the F.B.I. said the top goal of the investigation was to determine how Ms. Malik and Mr. Farook became radicalized.
“The question we are trying to get at is how did that happen and by whom, and where did it happen,” Mr. Bowdich said. The federal authorities also disclosed that investigators had recovered 19 types of pipes in the couple’s home that could have been made into bombs, an increase from the 12 earlier identified.
John E. D’Angelo, the special assistant agent in charge of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, said that Mr. Farook used his name to legally buy three of the guns seized after the attack. Two other weapons were bought by Enrique Marquez, a former neighbor of his family in Riverside.
Officials said they were investigating how Mr. Farook ended up with the guns. Mr. Bowdich declined to say if Mr. Marquez, whose home has been searched twice in recent days by federal agents, was a suspect.
Exit polls in France showed that Marine Le Pen’s right-wing National Rally (RN) party made huge gains to win the first round of election on Sunday. However, the final outcome will depend on how people trade votes in the days before next week’s run-off.
Exit polls from Ipsos, Ifop, OpinionWay, and Elabe showed that the RN got about 34% of the vote. This was a big loss for President Emmanuel Macron, who called the early election after his party lost badly in the European Parliament elections earlier this month.
The National Rally (RN) easily won more votes than its opponents on the left and center, including Macron’s Together group, whose bloc was predicted to get 20.5% to 23% of the vote. Exit polls showed that the New Popular Front (NFP), a hastily put together left-wing alliance, would get about 29% of the vote.
The results of the exit polls matched what people said in polls before the election, which made Le Pen’s fans very happy. But they didn’t say for sure if the anti-immigrant, anti-EU National Rally (RN) will be able to “cohabit” with the pro-EU Macron in a government after the runoff election next Sunday.
Voters in France Angry at Macron
Many French people have looked down on the National Rally (RN) for a long time, but now it is closer to power than it has ever been. A party known for racism and antisemitism has tried to clean up its image, and it has worked. Voters are angry at Macron, the high cost of living, and rising concerns about immigration.
Fans of Marine Le Pen waved French flags and sang the Marseillaise in the northern French district of Henin-Beaumont. The crowd cheered as Le Pen said, “The French have shown they are ready to turn the page on a power that is disrespectful and destructive.”
The National Rally’s chances of taking power next week will rest on what political deals its opponents make in the next few days. Right-wing and left-wing parties used to work together to keep the National Rally (RN) out of power, but the “republican front,” which refers to this group, is less stable than ever.
If no candidate gets 50% of the vote in the first round, the top two candidates and anyone else with 12.5% of the registered voters immediately move on to the second round. The district goes to the person who gets the most votes in the runoff.
France is likely to have a record number of three-way runoffs because so many people voted on Sunday. Experts say that these are much better for the National Rally (RN) than two-way games. Almost right away on Sunday night, the horse trade began.
Macron asked people to support candidates who are “clearly republican and democratic.” Based on what he has said recently, this would rule out candidates from the National Rally (RN) and the hard-left France Unbowed (LFI) party. Leaders on the far left and the center left both asked their third-placed candidates to drop out.
Minority government
Jean-Luc Melenchon, leader of France Unbowed, said, “Our rule is simple and clear: not a single more vote for the National Rally.” But the center-right Republicans party, which split before the vote when some of its members joined the RN, didn’t say anything.
The president of the RN party, Jordan Bardella, who is 28 years old, said he was ready to be prime minister if his party gets a majority of seats. He has said he won’t try to make a minority government, and neither Macron nor the communist NFP will work with him.
“I will be a “cohabitation” Prime Minister, respectful of the constitution and of the office of President of the Republic, but uncompromising about the policies we will implement,” he said.
A few thousand anti-RN protesters met in Paris’s Republique square on Sunday night for a rally of the leftist alliance. The mood was gloomy.
Niya Khaldi, a 33-year-old teacher, said that the RN’s good results made her feel “disgust, sadness, and fear.”
“This is not how I normally act,” she said. “I think I came to reassure myself, to not feel alone.”
Election Runoff
The result on Sunday didn’t have much of an effect on the market. In early Asia-Pacific trade, the euro gained about 0.23%. Fiona Cincotta, a senior markets expert at City Index in London, said she was glad the outcome “didn’t come as a surprise.”
“Le Pen had a slightly smaller margin than some of the polls had pointed to, which may have helped the euro a little bit higher on the open,” she noted. “Now everyone is waiting for July 7 to see if the second round supports a clear majority or not. So it does feel like we’re on the edge of something.”
Some pollsters thought the RN would win the most seats in the National Assembly, but Elabe was the only one who thought the party would win all 289 seats in the run-off. Seat projections made after the first round of voting are often very wrong, and this race is no exception.
On Sunday night, Reuters reported there were no final results for the whole country yet, but they were due in the next few hours. In France, exit polls have usually been very accurate.
Voter turnout was high compared to previous parliamentary elections. This shows how passionate people are about politics after Macron made the shocking and politically risky decision to call a vote in parliament.
Mathieu Gallard, research head at Ipsos France, said that at 1500 GMT, nearly 60% of voters had turned out, up from 39.42% two years earlier. This was the highest comparable turnout since the 1986 legislative vote. It wasn’t clear when the official number of people who voted would be changed.
(CTN News) – Pakistan’s Ambassador to the United States, Masood Khan, has urged Washington to provide Pakistan with sophisticated small arms and communication equipment to ensure the success of Operation Azm-e-Istehkam, a newly approved counter-terrorism initiative in the country.
The federal government recently approved the reinvigorated national counter-terrorism drive, which comprises three components: doctrinal, societal, and operational.
Ambassador Khan noted that work on the first two phases has already begun, with the third phase set to be implemented soon.
Addressing US policymakers, scholars, and corporate leaders at the Wilson Center in Washington, Khan emphasized the importance of strong security links, enhanced intelligence cooperation, and the resumption of sales of advanced military platforms between Pakistan and the US.
He argued that this is crucial for regional security and countering the rising tide of terrorism, which also threatens the interests of the US and its allies.
“Pakistan has launched Azm-i-Istehkam […] to oppose and dismantle terrorist networks. For that, we need sophisticated small arms and communication equipment,” said Ambassador Khan.
Pakistan–United States relations
The ambassador observed that the prospects of Pakistan-United States relations were bright, stating that the two countries “share values, our security and economic interests are interwoven, and it is the aspiration of our two peoples that strengthens our ties.”
He invited US investors and businesses to explore Pakistan’s potential in terms of demographic dividend, technological advancements, and market opportunities.
Khan also suggested that the US should consider Pakistan as a partner in its diplomatic efforts in Kabul and collaborate on counterterrorism and the rights of women and girls in Afghanistan.
He stressed that the bilateral relationship should be based on ground realities and not be hindered by a few issues.
“We should not base our engagement on the incongruity of expectations.
Our ties should be anchored in ground realities, even as we aim for stronger security and economic partnerships. Secondly, one or two issues should not hold the entire relationship hostage,” said the ambassador.
China has reassured Taiwanese citizens that they can visit the mainland “without the slightest worry”, despite Taiwan raising its travel alert to the second-highest level in response to Beijing’s new judicial guidelines targeting supporters of Taiwanese independence.
Last week, China published guidelines that could impose the death penalty for “particularly serious” cases involving “diehard” advocates of Taiwanese independence.
In response, Taiwan’s government urged the public to avoid “unnecessary travel” to mainland China and Hong Kong, and raised its travel warning to the “orange” level.
However, Zhu Fenglian, a spokeswoman for a Chinese body overseeing Taiwan affairs, stated that the new directives are “aimed solely at the very small number of supporters of ‘Taiwan independence’, who are engaged in malicious acts and utterances”.
She emphasized that “the vast majority of Taiwan compatriots involved in cross-strait exchanges and cooperation do not need to have the slightest worry when they come to or leave mainland China”.
“They can arrive in high spirits and leave fully satisfied with their stay,” Zhu added.
What’s Behind The China-Taiwan Tensions?
The tensions stem from the longstanding dispute over Taiwan’s status. Mainland China claims Taiwan as part of its territory and has refused to rule out using force to bring the democratic island under its control, while Taiwan sees itself as a sovereign state.
Beijing has not conducted top-level communications with Taipei since 2016, when the Democratic Progressive Party’s Tsai Ing-wen became Taiwan’s leader. China has since branded her successor, President Lai Ching-te, a “dangerous separatist”.
“The DPP authorities have fabricated excuses to deceive the people on the island and incite confrontation and opposition,” Zhu said in her statement.
Despite the political tensions, many Taiwanese continue to travel to mainland China for work, study, or business.
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