Sohiel Kabir is a naturalized citizen and was charged in 2012 with providing material support to the Taliban.
CNN: FBI investigators say they believe San Bernardino shooter Syed Rizwan Farook had ties to one of four Riverside, California, men who were charged in 2012 with planning to join al Qaeda in Afghanistan, two U.S. law enforcement officials said on condition of anonymity Thursday.
The officials said Farook was in the social circle of Sohiel Kabir, who the FBI has said recruited and helped radicalize the other three men in the Riverside group.
Kabir, who was apprehended in Afghanistan in 2012, was sentenced this year to 25 years in prison for his role in the case.
FBI investigators who are probing the San Bernardino shooting are taking a new look at Kabir, the two officials said.
The FBI says the husband-and-wife team behind the San Bernardino attacks had developed extremist views before they even met.
“They were actually radicalized before they started courting or dating each other online, and online as early as the end of 2013, they were talking to each other about jihad and martyrdom before they became engaged and then married and lived together in the United States,” FBI Director James Comey said at a Senate oversight hearing Wednesday.
“We also believe they were inspired by foreign terrorist organizations,” he added. “We’re working very hard to understand exactly their association and the source of their inspiration.”
Investigators are also looking at whether Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik had “other plans either for that date (last week) or earlier,” Comey said.
When asked by the Senate panel whether a terrorist operative or group arranged the couple’s marriage, Comey stated: “I don’t know the answer to that yet.”
When pressed whether such an arranged marriage would be a “game changer” in the FBI investigation, Comey added, “It would be very, very important thing to know.”
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It is becoming apparent that the dating sites that jihadis join are not for meeting or dating at all, it appears they are created as cover to merge like-minded terrorist together. Clues are pointing to this notion in the case of Farook and his arranged wife, Tashfeen Malik.
In part DailyMail: The FBI is investigating whether the marriage between San Bernardino killers Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik was set up by a terror group such as ISIS.
Senator Lindsey Graham raised the possibility that the pair could have been brought together by terrorists in Congress today, after it was revealed they were radicalized before they started dating.
When Graham put the prospect to FBI Director James Comey, he said: ‘I don’t know the answer to that yet,’ but added that it is ‘a very, very important thing to know’.It was previously believed that Malik, from Pakistan, had become radicalized long before her husband, perhaps dating back to her time at university in 2009 when family members say she became much more conservative and started wearing a full-body veil.
Malik was then thought to have sought out American-born Farook online, before moving to the U.S. on a fiancee visa and passing her murderous ideology on to him.
However, Comey today revised that narrative, telling a Senate Judiciary Committee that the pair began discussing jihad and martyrdom in late 2013, before they began their relationship.
Comey added that his agency believes the pair were inspired by foreign terror organizations, but is still investigating which group they were affiliated with.
The pair professed their loyalty to ISIS during their December 2 attack on the Inland Regional Center in California which killed 14 and injured another 21.
But Comey raised doubt over whether ISIS was behind the pair’s initial obsession with jihad, as it had yet to rise to prominence in 2013 when they began discussing the subject online.
It is also still unclear whether either partner had contact with a terrorist organization, or whether they simply viewed radical material via the internet.
It is also important to integrate yet another fact and that is the neighbor and gun buyer for Farook, Enrique Marquez, he is married to a Russian who came to the United States on a J1 visa and they don’t live together.
Going back to 2014:
An Islamic rights organization has asked for the public’s help in gathering information about a secret FBI informant whose claims led to a homegrown terrorism conspiracy indictment, with trial set to start Tuesday, Aug. 12, in Riverside for two Inland men charged with plotting to meet with the Taliban and al-Qaida and murder Americans overseas.
An attorney for the Greater Los Angeles area office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations said Monday the organization “can’t say we won’t” expose the identity of the informant, if it comes across verifiable information.
“It will come down to what is in the best interest of our community,” said Fatima Dadabhoy, senior civil rights attorney for the Los Angeles office of CAIR.
The organization asked for those with information to call its Anaheim office’s civil rights hotline, or call the federal public defender investigator’s office in Riverside.
The federal public defender investigator’s office is not working in cooperation with CAIR, said Jeffrey A. Aaron, the deputy federal public defender who is one of the attorneys representing Sohiel Omar Kabir of Pomona, whom prosecutors have identified as the leader of the conspiracy.
Dadabhoy said her organization believes the FBI has used confidential informants to entrap people, and that a majority of terrorist plots are fabricated or provoked by the FBI.
“We want to make sure that our community is aware,” she said. “When the FBI sends in people with this criminal background into our community, we want to know how they are acting and who is vulnerable to them. Our best way is to identify this and the tactics that are being used.”
U.S. Attorney spokesman Thom Mrozek declined to comment Monday. The FBI also declined to comment Monday, citing the pending case.
In court papers, defense attorneys have described the FBI informant as a “convicted drug trafficker” who has been paid “‘over’ a quarter million dollars” and was being allowed to stay in the United States, although he should be deported for his felony conviction.
The CAIR-Los Angeles news release issued Sunday said the amount paid to the informant is now $356,645 and that the informant’s conviction was for trafficking pseudoephedrine, a decongestant used to make methamphetamine.
Whether the informant – referred to as a “confidential human resource” in court papers – will testify during the anticipated 20-day trial is unknown; like many documents in the case that started in late 2012, the government’s witness list is sealed.
Dadabhoy said she knew of no existing positive identification of the informant. “There is no picture of him. If there is information, then maybe we will put together an advisory for the community about who this person may be,” she said.
The case broke in November 2012 with the arrests of Kabir in Afghanistan and three others – Ralph Deleon of Ontario, Arifeen David Gojali of Riverside and Miguel Santana of Upland, who authorities said were about to leave for the first leg of their trip from the United States to Afghanistan.
The government’s case brief says the defendants’ alleged conspiracy was underway before they met with the informant in February 2012, when one of them told him of a plan to travel overseas “to engage in violent jihad.”
