An officer looks over the evidence near the remains of a SUV involved in Wednesday’s attack in San Bernardino, California.MARIO ANZUONI/Reuters
A bloody rampage in California – unlike almost any mass shooting in modern American history – is now being treated as a potential act of terrorism.
Federal authorities have taken over an investigation into a shooting at a workplace holiday party in San Bernardino, about an hour's drive east of Los Angeles, that left 14 dead and 21 injured.
The shift in the investigation's focus comes as authorities learned that the husband-and-wife shooters – Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik – had ties to Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. In addition, authorities said, Mr. Farook had contact by phone and social media with people who were the subject of terrorism investigation – although that contact was apparently too incidental to pique the curiosity of investigators about Mr. Farook himself at the time.
In the aftermath of Wednesday's carnage, police found a stunning cache of weapons. The shooters were armed with two handguns, two assault rifles and more than 1,000 rounds of ammunition. At a nearby home, investigators found thousands more rounds, as well as a dozen pipe bombs.
The sheer size of the arsenal has led investigators to believe that, whatever their motive, the shooters went through extensive planning. However, a day after the sixth-deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history, nobody can yet say with certainty what motivated the rampage.
Ms. Malik's involvement marks a sharp break with almost all mass shootings in recent memory. Very rarely is there more than one assailant involved in a mass shooting – and hardly ever is one of the shooters a female.
Even as the FBI investigation shifts focus to the possibility that Mr. Farook, 28, and Ms. Malik, 27, might have been radicalized, officials are still cautious not to make the connection outright.
"It would be irresponsible and premature for me to call this terrorism," said David Bowdich, who runs the FBI's Los Angeles field office.
President Barack Obama echoed that call for patience, saying it was not yet known if the shooting was an act of terrorism or "workplace-related."
If, in fact, the husband and wife's shooting rampage was an act of workplace-related violence, it is perhaps the most meticulously planned, well-armed such act in recent U.S. history. According to investigators, Mr. Farook, who worked as an environmental inspector at the San Bernardino County Department of Public Health, left a department holiday banquet at the city's Inland Regional Center on Wednesday morning. When he returned with his wife, both were dressed in tactical gear and armed with high-powered rifles.
In the gunfire that followed, the pair fired upwards of 75 rounds, killing 14 people. The couple then sped off in a black SUV to a home in the nearby city of Redlands. When police spotted them there, the couple took off again, leading to a pursuit that ended in a bloody gun battle on a street near the site of the original shooting. When it was over, both suspects lay dead.
It was the worst gun violence of its kind in the United States since an assault in a Newtown, Conn., elementary school in 2012 left 20 children and six adults dead.
According to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, the couple's guns were all purchased legally. California has some of the toughest gun laws in the U.S., but there are certain types of assault rifles that can still be obtained in the state. An explosive contraption, which apparently failed to detonate, was also found at the site of the shooting.
Mr. Farook, who was born in Chicago to Pakistani parents and raised in California, appears to have had no criminal record. He also appears to have had a tumultuous home life – according to divorce records obtained by Associated Press, Mr. Farook's mother alleged her husband was an abusive alcoholic who attacked her in front of the couple's children.
In the summer of 2014, Mr. Farook returned from a trip to Saudi Arabia with his new fiancée, Ms. Malik. The two soon had a child – an occasion that prompted some of Mr. Farook's co-workers to throw them a baby shower.
On Wednesday morning, just before driving to the Inland Regional Center and killing some of those co-workers, the couple left their six-month-old baby with Mr. Farook's mother.
In San Bernardino on Thursday, remnants of the previous day's carnage were readily visible. Police vehicles were present throughout the centre of the city, and several major streets were cordoned off entirely. The sprawling investigation means that vast portions of the area – including the site of the shooting, many nearby streets and the home in Redlands – will not return to normal for days, perhaps weeks.
The focus on whether Wednesday's attack constitutes terrorism – a term governments usually reserve for violence with a political purpose, but which some Muslim groups contend is largely used only for criminals who align themselves with that faith – has quickly overtaken almost all other aspects of the incident in the public spotlight.
Meanwhile, the initial wave of outrage over the shooters' ability to so readily acquire the guns necessary to carry out the massacre seems to have had little impact on actual gun-control policy. On Thursday, Republicans in the Senate managed to block several measures to add gun-control provisions to a budget bill.
One such measure, introduced by California Democrat Dianne Feinstein, would have prohibited the sale of guns to people currently on the government's anti-terrorist no-fly list. However some Republicans opposed to the measure argued that the no-fly list is too riddled with errors to be used for such purposes.