Syed’s first jihad plot
Schemed with neighbor
Years before he met his rifle-slinging Pakistani bride, San Bernardino terrorist Syed Rizwan Farook plotted jihad with his boyhood nextdoor neighbor in 2012, it was revealed Wednesday.
Farook’s pal, Islamconvert Enrique Marquez, had by then purchased the firepower to pull off an attack: the very same two AR15s that Farook and wife Tashfeen Malik would use last week in slaughtering 14 people at the Inland Regional Center.
A specific target was weighed, CNN reported, citing two US officials, though they did not identify it.
But Marquez, who is cooperating with the FBI, has told investigators that he got cold feet and the 2012 plot fell through, the network reported.
Marquez, 24, has also told investigators that he had no advance knowledge of last week’s massacre.
But a Marquez pal told ABC News that at a party months ago, the glasseswearing Walmart employee made a remark that in hindsight was prophetic.
“He said something along the lines of, ‘There’s a lot of Muslims in our own backyard, just ready to go haywire and attack,’ ” the friend, Michael G. Stone, told ABC.
“And we didn’t think nothing of it. We just brushed it aside, you know. He was drunk, so I don’t know.”
Immediately after last week’s shooting, Marquez took to Facebook to apologize. “I’m. Very sorry guys. It was a pleasure” [sic].
Marquez then checked himself in to a mental institution, delaying the investigation. Federal agents raided Marquez’s home Saturday, but were only able to interview him Tuesday. He so far has not been charged.
Marquez and Farook lived sidebyside in Riverside, Calif., from childhood until only a few months ago, when Farook and new bride Malik took their infant daughter and moved 17 miles northeast to his mom’s town house in Redlands.
As a teen, Marquez attended a nearby mosque with the Farook family and, by 2011, the two were radicalized, sources told CNN.
The two friends would also wind up related by marriage.
Marquez on Nov. 29, 2014, married Mariya Chernykh, the sister of Farook’s sisterinlaw, Reuters reported, citing marriage documents.
Gasser Shehati, Farook’s friend from a mosque, said Farook told him several years ago that Marquez had converted to Islam.
Employees at a Walmart in Corona, Calif., said Marquez worked there as an assetprotection and customer specialist for about six months, and was last seen there on Nov. 29.