San Francisco: US authorities have decided to bring criminal charges against the friend of a Pakistani-American couple, who recently killed 14 people in a shooting rampage in California, a media report said on Thursday.
Quoting several law enforcement officials, NBC News reported that the first criminal charges to stem from the massacre will be brought against Enrique Marquez, a long-time friend and former neighbour of gunman Syed Rizwan Farook, a Pakistani-American.
Investigators have said Marquez bought the two AR-15 assault rifles three years ago that wound up being used in the shooting in San Bernardino by Farook, 28, and his wife Tashfeen Malik, a 29-year-old Pakistani national.
Fourteen people were killed and 22 others wounded at a Christmas party at the IRC, a social service center in San Bernardino on December 2 when the couple fired indiscriminately using the assault rifles bought by Marquez.
Marquez has told officials that he did it as a favor, so that Farook would not have to go through a background check or be on record as the purchaser, the report said.
Marquez has also told the FBI that he and Farook talked about conducting some kind of attack in 2010 but called it off after unrelated terrorism arrests in southern California.
FBI Director James Comey yesterday said agents have found no connection between Farook and the people arrested back then.
"So far in this investigation, we have found no evidence of posting on social media by either of them at that period of time and thereafter reflecting their commitment to jihad or martyrdom," Comey said.
He also said despite some reports to the contrary that investigators have found no social media postings by Malik in the months before she came to the US.
That means the State Department and Homeland Security officials who reviewed her background before giving her a fiancee visa did not miss any publicly available social media postings. All her statements in support of jihad, Comey says, were in private messages or e-mails.
Officials believe that Farook and his wife were inspired by, rather than organised by ISIS. Comey said the ISIS terror group has perfected the use of social media, and Twitter in particular, to contact potential followers in the United States and elsewhere.
"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.
Meanwhile, President Barack Obama is set to visit San Bernardino tomorrow to meet with shooting the victims and their family members.
