Photo via Flickr user Peter Stevens
Tashfeen Malik, the 27-year-old Pakistani woman who authorities believe helped plan and carry out Wednesday's tragic mass shooting in San Bernardino, pledged allegiance to the Islamic State in a since-deleted post on Facebook before the shooting, federal law enforcement officials said Friday. Though there's still no evidence that the attacks were a result of any kind of directive from a terrorist organization—the Islamic State or otherwise—it is looking less and less like they were the product of some kind of workplace dispute, as the New York Times reports.
"At this point we believe they were more self-radicalized and inspired by the group than actually told to do the shooting," one federal law enforcement official told the paper.
Prior to the shooting, Malik and her husband, 28-year-old American Syed Farook, took care to delete information from some of their electronic devices, a move that suggests planning and would seem to hint at some kind of ideological motivation.
The couple apparently met online at a Muslim dating site, and Malik lived in Saudi Arabia before moving to the US two years ago after they were married. As a deep dive by the Washington Post suggests, the two presented as a regular family. They had a nice home, a six-month-old daughter, and job security, and Malik had to pass background checks before being admitted to the US under a visa program, according to the Times.
"He was married, he had a daughter and last year he made $77,000. He had everything to be happy," a friend who attended the same mosque as Farook, Gasser Shehata, told AFP, which also reports acquaintances say the couple were living "the American Dream" and exhibited no outward extremist views or anti-American sentiment.
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