Islamic State praises San Bernardino attack but doesn’t claim responsibility

In an online radio broadcast Saturday by the Islamic State, the group said that two “supporters” had carried out the attacks in San Bernardino but stopped short of referring to the couple as members. The group praised the attacks but did not claim responsibility for it, according to the Associated Press.

The FBI said on Friday that it is investigating the San Bernardino, Calif., massacre as an act of terrorism, with officials revealing that the Pakistani woman who teamed with her husband in the slaughter went on Facebook afterward to pledge her allegiance to the leader of the Islamic State.

Investigators are trying to determine whether the husband-and-wife killers acted alone – inspired, but not directed, by foreign Islamist radicals – or were involved in a more elaborate plot.

Hundreds of federal agents, in the United States and overseas, are looking for any contacts that the shooters – Chicago-born Syed Rizwan Farook, 29, and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, 27 – might have had with terrorist groups.

“The investigation so far has developed indications of radicalization by the killers and of potential inspiration by foreign terrorist organizations,” FBI Director James Comey said Friday. But he said that, so far, there is no evidence that they were part of a larger group.

In his weekly radio address Saturday, President Barack Obama urged the country to remain united in the wake of Wednesday’s attack. He urged patience as federal law enforcement works to get a “full picture” of the shooters’ motives.

“It is entirely possible that these two attackers were radicalized to commit this act of terror,” Obama said. “And if so, it would underscore a threat we’ve been focused on for years – the danger of people succumbing to violent extremist ideologies.”

There are a host of unknowns in this case, including whether the shooters had other targets in mind, a possibility suggested by the dozen pipe bombs and the thousands of rounds of ammunition in their apartment.

The shooters also sought to cover their tracks by damaging some of their personal electronic devices. Authorities found two crushed cellphones near the apartment and were examining other evidence that the shooters “attempted to destroy their digital fingerprints,” said David Bowdich, assistant director in charge of the FBI’s Los Angeles office.

Farook and Malik were slain by police in a frenzied gun battle four hours after they killed 14 people and wounded 21 in an attack on Wednesday at a holiday gathering of county workers. For two days, FBI officials – as well as the president – had expressed uncertainty about whether the rampage at the Inland Regional Center was terrorism or an unusual case of workplace violence.

But new evidence pointed to an ideological motivation rather than a workplace grudge. Law enforcement officials said that, after the shooting, Malik went on Facebook and pledged her allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State, the militant group that says it has established a caliphate in Syria and Iraq.

A Facebook official confirmed the posting, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the ongoing investigation. The official said Facebook, which is cooperating with law enforcement, identified and removed the post a day after the attack, saying any content praising an Islamic State leader violates its community standards.

In Saudi Arabia, intelligence agencies are investigating Malik’s time in that country. The Saudi government has not confirmed when she lived there or whether she left with Farook when he visited for nine days in the early summer of 2014.

A Saudi official said that Malik’s name does not appear on any watchlist there and that no evidence has been uncovered of contacts between her and any radical individual or group during her time there. The official said Malik had lived with her father “off and on” in Saudi Arabia over the years, apparently traveling back and forth an undetermined number of times to Pakistan, her country of birth.

A senior law enforcement official said Friday that the attack in San Bernardino evoked the mass shooting in Chattanooga, Tenn., earlier this year, when 24-year-old Mohammad Youssef Abdulazeez opened fire at an armed-forces recruiting center and a Navy Reserve center, killing five people. In that case, the official pointed out, it took days for the FBI to sort out what had happened, and some questions remain unanswered.

Some evidence collected in California was flown across the country on Thursday so the FBI could examine it in its lab, Bowdich said.

The FBI’s Operational Technology Division in Quantico, Virginia, has units that can try to retrieve data from smashed, burned and damaged devices, including cellphones, hard drives and flash drives. A computer analysis team there can try to pull call records, pictures, GPS location data, address book information and other data from the devices, while a forensic analysis unit can attempt to restore and enhance audio and visual data.

In the meantime, the FBI said Americans should be alert but not panicked about the threat of further terrorist attacks.

“Do not let fear become disabling,” Comey said. “Please channel that sense of fear into something healthy. Just an awareness of your surroundings.”

William Dauber, Abby Philip, Thomas Gibbons-Neff, Missy Ryan and Eli Saslow in San Bernardino, Calif.; Tim Craig in Islamabad, Pakistan; and Karen DeYoung, Sarah Larimer, Ellen Nakashima, Greg Miller, Brian Murphy, Niraj Chokshi, Sari Horwitz, Elahe Izadi, Wesley Lowery, Kevin Sullivan, Julie Tate and Alice Crites in Washington contributed to this report.

This story was originally published December 5, 2015 at 1:46 PM with the headline "Islamic State praises San Bernardino attack but doesn’t claim responsibility."