The FBI has revealed that the couple who massacred 14 people in San Bernardino, California last week had been into radicalization for "quite some time" and practiced shooting at a local range.
Syed Rizwan Farook, 28, and his wife Tashfeen Malik, 27, had opened fire at a holiday gathering of about 75 to 80 people in the center where Farook worked, killing 14 and wounding 21 others.
Farook visited the Riverside range and practiced with two different kind of guns before the shooting, and his wife accompanied him to one of the sessions, according to FBI.
After firing at the center, they got on a rented SUV, and four hours later were detected by the police. As their vehicle was cornered, they exchanged fire with the police, and were shot dead.
Five firearms, ammunition, explosives and other materials used for making pipe bombs were recovered from their home.
On the morning of the shooting carnage, they had left their 6-month-old daughter with Farook's mother, saying they had a doctor's appointment. The same day, Malik pledged allegiance to ISIS on her Facebook page, according to media reports.
David Bowdich, assistant director at FBI, raised the question of how Farook could have come to be radicalized. Farook was born to Pakistani immigrant parents and had lived in California all his life, while his wife was born in Pakistan but grew up in Saudi Arabia.
Farook had travelled to Saudi Arabia in 2014 over a "long vacation", as described by his coworkers, and returned with Malik, who entered US through a "fiancée visa."
"How did that [radicalization] happen is the question," Bowdich said. "And by whom, and where did that happen? And I will tell you right now we don't know those answers at this point."
FBI has not yet found any evidence linking the assailants with a broader terror networks, and no other people have been identified as co-conspirators in the attacks.
"I want to be crystal clear here: We do not see any evidence so far of ... an outside-continental-US plot. We may find it someday, we may not. We don't know," Bowdich said.
President Obama used a live address to declare the shooting as an act of terrorism, and said that the resolve to fight against the ISIS will continue.
None of the perpetrators had a previous history of criminal misdemeanor, nor were they on the terrorism watch list.
The government has long been on alert for homegrown radicalized groups, which can hit the easy targets such as at unprotected public places.
"We have moved to an entirely new phase in the global terrorist threat and in our homeland security efforts," Jeh Johnson, the secretary of Homeland Security, told The New York Times. Terrorists have "in effect outsourced attempts to attack our homeland. We've seen this not just here but in other places. This requires a whole new approach, in my view."
