The FBI’s top investigator in the San Bernardino, California, terrorist attacks said Friday that the husband and wife who shot and killed 14 people Dec. 2 also intended to detonate an explosive device inside the room, through the exact timetable of the plot remains unclear.
David Bowdich, the assistant director in charge of the FBI’s Los Angeles field office, said Friday that investigators have confirmed that Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, attempted to detonate a pipe bomb hidden inside a bag at the Inland Regional Center.
What investigators don’t know is whether they planned to detonate the bomb first and then open fire on first responders, or to detonate the device as paramedics and police descended on the facility to tend to gunshot victims, he said.
“What we don’t know was the intent. Was the intent to detonate prior to their attack?” he said. “We just don’t have the answer.”
Bowdich said last week that Farook brought a bag containing the pipe bomb into the facility when he arrived at 8:37 a.m. An FBI affidavit said the device was made of three galvanized steel pipes and smokeless powder and was attached to a remote-control toy car. The bomb was “armed and ready to detonate.”
Agents found a remote control for a toy car in the couple’s SUV, the affidavit said.
Bowdich said it may be impossible for investigators to determine the couple’s exact plans for use of the bomb, as they have recovered no documents, schematics or other electronic data that reveal planning of the assault.
“And I will be quite frank. I am not sure we will ever know that answer,” he said in an interview Friday.
Though FBI agents have scoured the couple’s social media accounts and other electronic devices, they have yet to find the hard drive from the couple’s home computer, Bowdich said. He said the device is one of the crucial pieces of outstanding evidence.
Bowdich also said Friday that investigators have not found any evidence that Farook’s relatives had prior knowledge of the attack, a critical detail as the FBI attempts to determine if they had any help plotting the attack.
Bowdich said it is not clear how the family could have been oblivious to Farook’s plans, given the stockpile of weapons found in the family’s Redlands home.
“The answer is we are still working through that,” he said Friday. “This is an investigation we are being very cautious with. We just don’t know at this point.”
The only accomplice who has been charged in the attack is Enrique Marquez, a longtime friend of Farook who has been accused of purchasing two of the weapons used in the shootings.
Investigators have ruled out the possibility that Farook and Malik carried out the shooting at the direction of a foreign terrorist organization, determining that they were inspired to launch the attack by radical Islamist propaganda.
The FBI has yet to find any evidence that Farook and Malik were plotting a second attack, Bowdich said. Agents, when they searched the couple’s Redlands home last month, found thousands of rounds of rifle and handgun ammunition, and a dozen explosive devices.
Six weeks into the investigation, Bowdich said there is still much that may be difficult or impossible to determine about the couple’s actions.
“One of the unexplained questions we have is ‘why that day and why that venue?’” he said. “Did they plan secondary attacks? We just don’t know. They were heavily armed.”
Last week, the FBI released a detailed timeline of Farook’s and Malik’s movements between the shootings and their deaths in a firefight with police hours later. By reviewing cellphone records, surveillance video and witness accounts, the FBI has managed to determined their movements for all but 18 minutes of that time.
“Until we know what happened in those 18 minutes, I am uncomfortable and my investigators are uncomfortable,” Bowdich said Friday. “Because you just don’t if they met with someone and that is disconcerting.”
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