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Thursday, March 28, 2024 | Back issues
Courthouse News Service Courthouse News Service

FBI Search Lake for Terrorists’ Hard Drive

SAN BERNARDINO, Calif. (CN) - An FBI dive team continued to search a San Bernardino lake looking for "a hard drive or anything the shooters threw in," another front in the investigation of the terror attack that killed 14 and injured 22.

The agency, along with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, is following up on credible reports that the killers, Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife Tashfeen Malik, visited Seccombe Lake in the immediate aftermath of the massacre at nearby the Inland Regional Center.

"We are building a timeline of everything we know to ensure that we can retrace every step they took," David Bowdich, assistant director of the FBI's Los Angeles office, said at a press conference on Thursday.

"We're just trying to ensure we can account for every minute of that day."

Of particular interest to investigations in the location of a missing hard drive from a computer seized during a search of the townhouse the couple shared in Redlands.

The FBI said the drive could contain information about whether Farook and Malik were planning an even larger and more deadly attack before they turned their guns on Farook's co-workers from the San Bernardino Public Health Department.

If the drive is in Seccombe Lake, the FBI team is determined to find it. The manmade lake, which is within a small park, is about three miles from the scene of the shooting.

A Courthouse News reporter went to the lake Thursday, and asked a guard there whether divers had found anything.

"No, not yet. But this is the third day divers have been in the water," he said.

As reporters stood at the lakefront and watched, a diver surfaced and disappeared back into the murky water. Ten minutes later, another diver surfaced.

Nothing has been found in the lake as of Friday afternoon.

Authorities are also looking into a possible connection between Farook and Sohiel Omar Kabir, the leader of a terrorist group from Pomona who was among four men arrested in 2012 for plotting to wage "violent jihad" by joining forces with al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.

But Bowdich said that while the men had planned to attack U.S. military bases in Afghanistan, they had no plans to commit terrorist acts in the United States.

"We watched them for months and months," he said.

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