‘No evidence couple part of terrorist cell’

Husband, wife behind attack buried in California

NEW YORK, Dec 17, (Agencies): There is no evidence a married couple who killed 14 people in California this month were part of a terrorist cell, the head of the FBI said on Wednesday, confirming that investigators believe the pair were inspired but not directed by Islamic State.

The Islamist militant group has “revolutionized” terrorism by seeking to inspire such small-scale attacks, FBI Director James Comey said, noting the group uses social media, encrypted communications and slickly produced propaganda to recruit followers around the world.

“Your parents’ al Qaeda was a very different model than the threat we face today,” Comey told a counterterrorism conference in New York.

However, he said that while the perpetrators of the Dec 2 shootings in San Bernardino, California — Syed Rizwan Farook, 28, and Tashfeen Malik, 29 — had expressed support for “jihad and martyrdom” in private communications as early as 2013, they never did so publicly on social media.

He also said authorities believe Mohammed Abdulazeez, the suspect in July’s fatal shooting of four US Marines and a Navy sailor in Chattanooga, Tennessee, was radicalized by militant propaganda. Propaganda “To my mind, there’s no doubt that the Chattanooga killer was inspired and motivated by foreign terrorist organization propaganda,” he said, but did not specify any particular group.

Comey said the Federal Bureau of Investigation currently has “hundreds” of investigations in all 50 US states involving potential Islamic Stateinspired plots.

Islamic State controls wide swaths of Iraq and Syria, where it seeks to carve out a caliphate. It claimed responsibility for attacks in Paris on Nov 13 that killed 130 people.

The group has a three-pronged strategy, Comey said: recruit fighters to join it in the Middle East, inspire individuals in other countries to carry out attacks and send out trained operatives to commit violence in Europe and the United States.

It has perfected the use of social media, and Twitter in particular, to contact potential followers, he said.

“Twitter works as a way to sell books, as a way to promote movies, and it works as a way to crowdsource terrorism - to sell murder,” Comey said.

Islamic State also frequently employs encrypted communications, Comey said. He renewed his calls for technology companies to avoid creating devices and services that cannot be accessed, even with a proper court order.

But Comey said he is convinced that law enforcement and tech companies can work together without compromising personal privacy.

“We are not going to break the Internet,” he said.

Federal authorities are set to file criminal charges on Thursday against a man who investigators say supplied guns to the married couple behind the deadly San Bernardino, California, attack earlier this month, according to reports.

Enrique Marquez, a friend and former neighbor of radicalized Muslim Syed Rizwan Farook, who carried out the Dec 2 attack with his wife, Tashfeen Malik, that killed 14 people and injured 21, is due to be charged later on Thursday, CNN and NBC reported, citing unnamed law enforcement officials.

In the past several days US authorities have been preparing federal firearms charges against Marquez and perhaps state charges as well, a US government source told Reuters on condition of anonymity.

Checked

Marquez, who had checked himself into a Los Angeles-area psychiatric facility shortly after the shootings, had several connections to Farook and Malik and quickly became a key figure in the investigation of the shootings. The Federal Bureau of Investigation raided his home and questioned him for several days.

During the investigation, a law enforcement source said Marquez, who had converted to Islam, and Farook apparently had plotted some sort of attack around 2012 but abandoned the idea.

Marquez legally purchased the two AR-15 assault-style rifles that Farook and Malik used in their attack on a holiday party of Farook’s co-workers before they were killed in a shootout with police a few hours later.

An attack at two military installations in the US state of Tennessee in July that killed four Marines and a sailor was inspired by a “foreign terrorist group,” the FBI said.

FBI Director James Comey, whose agency led an investigation along with the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, said late Wednesday that the shooting was a “terrorist” case.

“We have concluded that the Chattanooga killer was inspired by a foreign terrorist organization’s propaganda,” Comey told reporters.

“We’ve investigated this from the beginning as a terrorist case.”

By designating the attack as having been led by a “foreign terrorist group,” the Pentagon was able to award the Purple Heart to the victims and a survivor, an honour extended to those wounded or killed while serving in the US military.

“Although the Purple Heart can never possibly replace this brave Sailor and these brave Marines, it is my hope that as their families and the entire department of the Navy team continue to mourn their loss, these awards provide some small measure of solace,” Navy Secretary Ray Mabus said.

Also: SAN BERNARDINO, California:

The bodies of a husband and wife behind the California shootings that killed 14 people have been released by authorities and buried.

Attorneys for family members told NBC News Wednesday that the Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik were buried on Tuesday afternoon in Southern California.

The attorneys, David Chesley and Mohammad Abuershaid, confirmed the burial to NBC News, but gave no further details.

‘Remnants being given away’:

Inside an aircraft hangar at Kennedy Airport, stacks of shirts sit neatly folded on a shelf, price tags still attached. But they are caked in dust and will never be sold. Mannequins, dressed in Victoria’s Secret tops, stand as if beckoning to shoppers long gone.

Nearby are mammoth hunks of rusty metal and wiring — parts of a global broadcast antenna that once crowned the World Trade Center.

These are some of the last remnants of a host of artifacts recovered after the Sept. 11 attacks that have been held in storage at the airport for 14 years by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owns the 16-acre trade center site. (AP)

‘Apologize to Canada natives’:

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Wednesday he would ask Pope Francis to formally apologize for more than a century of abuses at church-run boarding schools set up to assimilate Canada’s indigenous peoples.

A papal apology was among 94 recommendations presented this week to Ottawa by a truth and reconciliation commission that heard testimony about the “cultural genocide” from nearly 7,000 former students. (AFP)