California attacker ‘pledged allegiance to Islamic State’

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AP

Balloons adorn a makeshift memorial site honoring the victims of Wednesday's shooting rampage, on Friday in San Bernardino, California.

“Self-radicalised and inspired by the group rather than actually told to do the shooting”.

The woman who helped carry out the shooting in San Bernardino, California, on Wednesday had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State (IS) in a Facebook posting, according to federal law enforcement officials.

There’s no evidence the group directed the woman, Tashfeen Malik, and her husband Syed Rizwan Farook, to launch the attacks, which killed 14 and wounded 21, said the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “At this point we believe they were more self-radicalised and inspired by the group than actually told to do the shooting,” one of the officials said. The posting had been removed from the social media site and it’s not clear when federal authorities obtained it. In recent months, the FBI has been particularly concerned about individuals inspired by the IS staging attacks in the United States, law enforcement officials say.

The FBI refocused its efforts on these individuals earlier this year in response to a shift in tactics by the IS, law enforcement officials said. “We’ve especially focused on the portfolio of people we’re investigating for the potential of being homegrown violent extremists,” the FBI director, James Comey, had said last month at a news conference.

In the days leading up to the shooting, the couple took several steps to delete their electronic information, in an apparent effort to cover their tracks, officials said. Those efforts have led authorities to believe that the shooting was premeditated. — New York Times News Service