FBI: Florida shooter worked with al-Qaida

The Saudi Air Force gunman who killed three U.S. sailors at a Navy base in Florida last year repeatedly communicated with al-Qaida operatives before the attack, U.S. officials said Monday, as they lashed out at Apple for failing to help them open the shooter’s phones to access key evidence.

Officials found contacts between Mohammed Saeed Alshamrani and alQaida operatives after FBI technicians succeeded in breaking into two cellphones that had previously been locked and that the shooter, a Saudi Air Force officer, had tried to destroy before he was killed by law enforcement.

“We now have a clearer understanding of Alshamrani’s associations and activities in the years, months and days leading up to his attack,” Attorney General William Barr said at a news conference in which he sharply chastised Apple for not helping open the phones.

The new details, including that Alshamrani had been radicalized abroad before he arrived in the U.S., raise fresh questions about the vetting of Saudi military members who train at U.S. bases.

Apple rejected the characterization that it has been unhelpful. The company said Monday that it does not store customers’ passcodes, does not have the capacity to unlock passcode-protected devices and that weakening encryption could create vulnerabilities that damage national security and data privacy.

Alshamrani was killed by a sheriff’s deputy during the Dec. 6 rampage at Pensacola Naval Air Station. He had been undergoing flight training as part of instruction offered at American military bases to foreign nationals. He killed three sailors and injured eight other people.

Once unlocked, the phones revealed contact between Alshamrani and “dangerous” al-Qaida operatives up to the night before the attack. They revealed he had been radicalized since at least 2015, before he arrived in the U.S., and that he had meticulously planned the attack. FBI Director Chris Wray called it “the brutal culmination of years of planning and preparation.”

“He wasn’t just coordinating with them about planning and tactics,” Wray said. “He was helping the organization making the most it could out of his murders.”

Officials asked Apple to help extract data from two iPhones. But Wray said Apple provided “effectively no help” in unlocking the phones.