As investigators work to determine the backgrounds and motivations of the married couple suspected in last week’s mass shooting in San Bernardino, California, contradictory claims have emerged from Pakistan and Saudi Arabia about where the wife, Tashfeen Malik, spent her formative years.
Relatives and acquaintances of Malik in Pakistan said she had grown up in Saudi Arabia and had been influenced by its deeply conservative interpretation of Islam. But Saudi officials denied she spent significant time in the kingdom, saying she visited only twice, for a few months in total.Mr Rabbani said his brother (Tashfeen’s father) was a normal Barelvi Sunni Muslim, but might have taken interest in Salafi Islam in Saudi Arabia.The classmate said Tashfeen got admission to a Tafseer-i-Quran class in 2011-12 in Al Huda International Welfare Foundation’s Multan branch.Gulzar Malik was a postman in Taunsa, where he married the daughter of his colleague, Abdul Aziz. After a few years of his marriage, he resigned his job and settled in Karorr Lal Essan. Gulzar is a maternal cousin of a former provincial minister, Malik Ahmad Ali Auolakh.
His younger brother, Anwar Ahmed, lives in Karorr Lal Essan. According to Ahmed, Gulzar shifted to Riyadh 25 years ago and got a job in a construction company. Later he terminated his connections with the family due to a dispute over property with Javed Rabani, his brother.
The claims come as both countries, which have complicated relationships with the United States and have waged their own battles against Islamic militancy, seek to clear themselves of ties to the San Bernardino shootings, the worst terrorist attack on American soil since September 11, 2001. Both suspects were killed in a shootout with the police.
While the biography of the husband, Syed Rizwan Farook, who was born and raised in the United States by immigrant parents from Pakistan, became clear soon after the attack, the background of his spouse, Malik, who was born in Pakistan, has emerged more slowly.
Relatives of Malik, 29, said that she had moved with her father, an engineer, from a remote district of Punjab Province, Layyah in Pakistan to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, when she was a young child.
They said she had grown up there, and they attributed her adoption of a strict, conservative interpretation of Islam that involved not interacting with men outside her family and wearing a face veil to her time in Saudi Arabia.
From 2007 to at least 2012, Malik studied in Multan, Pakistan, the main city in southern Punjab, where one faculty member recalled her as a “Saudi girl” because her religious observance was so much stricter than that of her peers.
She obtained her place as a pharmacy student at Bahauddin Zakariya University under a quota system that reserves spots for the children of expatriate Pakistanis — suggesting that she had indeed grown up abroad.
Multiple members of Farook’s family in California said that she had grown up in Saudi Arabia, and on Monday, The Wall Street Journal quoted one of Malik’s brothers, who lives in Riyadh, as saying that Malik had lived there.
But Saudi officials have denied that she spent much time in the kingdom.
Maj Gen Mansour Turki, a spokesman for the Saudi Interior Ministry, said via text message on Saturday that Malik had visited the kingdom twice. In 2008, she arrived in June from Pakistan to visit her father and stayed for about nine weeks before returning to Pakistan, General Turki said
Then, in 2013, she arrived on June 8, from Pakistan, and departed for India on October 6 of the same year, General Turki said.
He gave her full name as Tashfeen Malik Gulzarahmed Malik and said his office did not know whether her father was still in the kingdom.
General Turki said there was “no evidence” that Malik had met her husband in the kingdom, but they were in Saudi Arabia at the same time for about five days in October 2013, according to information General Turki provided.
Farook, 28, visited Saudi Arabia twice, once for the hajj pilgrimage between October 1 and October 20, 2013, and once for an off-season pilgrimage known as umrah for nine days in July 2014.
American officials reported that the couple flew to the United States together from Jidda in July 2014. And members of a mosque the couple attended in California said they had been married in Saudi Arabia.
Both Saudi and Pakistani officials have bristled at the suggestion that their respective countries played any role in the radicalization of Malik and Farook.
In Multan, Pakistan, where Malik went to the university, the authorities swarmed around journalists who were seeking interviews with people who knew the family. “What is your intention?” one security guard asked a reporter seeking comment at the university. “Why do you want to interview people here? We will not allow anyone to malign our institution.”
Saudi officials, meanwhile, have rejected the idea that Malik took up more fundamentalist views in Saudi Arabia, or that it played a role in the relationship between her and Farook. The Saudi narrative has varied to the extent that one official denied she had ever been there
The day after the attack, Osama Nugali, a spokesman for the Saudi Foreign Ministry, said via text message that Farook had visited the kingdom only once, for nine days in 2014. He said he had no record of Malik having ever entered the kingdom.
“For the lady, we don’t have a record of this name,” he wrote.
The founder of Al-Huda Institute whose former student shot dead 14 people in California last week said the religious school organistaion has no links to extremists and cannot be held responsible for “personal acts” of any student.
Farhat Hashmi said in a statement on her website that Tashfeen Malik attended Al-Huda International Seminary’s branch in Multan briefly between 2013 and 2014 and left without completing the diploma course.
“We cannot be held responsible for personal acts of any of our students,” she said
“Al-Huda International Welfare Foundation is a non-political, non-secteranian and non-profit organisation which does not have any links to any extremist regime,” the statement said.
Further, the founder of one of Pakistan’s most high-profile religious seminaries for women said, “It seems that she was unable to understand the beautiful message of the Quran.”
“Any Muslim who is aware of the teachings of his/her religion and who adheres to the directives of the Holy Quran and the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh), will never involve himself/herself in such acts, because they will invoke the anger of Allah and lead to harm and corruption on earth,” the statement added.
Tashfeen Malik, 29, studied at the Al-Huda Institute in Multan, which targets middle-class women seeking to come closer to Islam and also has offices in the US, the UAE, India and the UK, the teacher at the seminary who gave her name only as Muqadas said
The institute has no known extremist links, though it has come under fire in the past from critics who say its ideology echoes that of the Taliban.
Malik and her husband Syed Farook, 28, went on a killing spree at a social services centre in San Bernardino, an act praised by the Islamic State group who hailed the couple as “soldiers” of its self-proclaimed caliphate.
Investigators suspect that Malik, who went to the United States on a fiancee’s visa and spent extended periods of time in both Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, may have radicalised her husband.
The probe is trying to establish if she had contact with Islamic radicals in either country.
“It was a two-year course, but she did not finish it,” the teacher Muqadas said.
“She was a good girl. I don’t know why she left and what happened to her.”
The teacher did not say when Malik studied at the seminary, but fellow classmates at the Bahauddin Zakariya University said she had attended the madrassa after classes at the university, which she attended from 2007-2013.
An administration official at the academy in Multan said he could neither confirm nor deny that Malik had studied there, and said he would discuss the issue with management.
“But we have nothing to do with it (the shooting) and are not responsible for our students’ personal acts,” he added.
One of Malik’s former classmates at the Bahauddin Zakariya University in Multan, where she studied pharmacology, told AFP she had attended the madrassa after classes, saying she “drastically changed” during her time there.
“Gradually she became more serious and strict,” said the student, requesting anonymity.
A second university student who also requested anonymity confirmed the account
Pakistan has pledged to crack down on religious seminaries suspected of being breeding grounds for intolerance or even fostering extremism, with the country’s information minister Pervaiz Rashid terming them “universities of illiteracy and ignorance”.
However the government’s efforts to rein in madrassas have prompted anger from many clerics who accuse the authorities of maligning religious leaders in a bid to build an “anti-Islamic narrative”.Estranged relatives of a Pakistani woman involved in a mass shooting in California spoke Sunday of their shame at her crimes, as former classmates and teachers painted a picture of a quiet, religiously conservative student.
Tashfeen Malik, 29, and her husband Syed Farook, 28, gunned down 14 people at a social services centre in San Bernardino, an act praised by the Islamic State group who hailed the couple as “soldiers” of its self-proclaimed caliphate
According to her uncle Malik Ahmed Ali Aulakh, who is a former provincial minister, Tashfeen was born in the village of Karor Lal Esan in the central province of Punjab but moved to Saudia Arabia around 1989.
Tashfeen’s father Gulzar Malik, an engineer, had grown distant from his family and “he never came back even to attend the marriages of close relatives”, added Aulakh.
“We are ashamed and shocked about this act done by our niece — why did she do something so gruesome? We can’t believe it,” he told AFP.
Malik Omar Ali Aulakh, another of her uncles, added: “We have not kept in touch with Gulzar’s family and he avoided contacting us.”
A Pakistani intelligence agent told AFP they had conducted a search Saturday of a second family home in the region’s main city of Multan, around 130 miles northwest of their ancestral village, but found nothing of interest.
An AFP reporter at the scene Sunday afternoon saw a woman wearing a black burqa and green sweater leaving the pink-and-white two-storey house located in a middle-class neighbourhood with a bearded man, both carrying luggage.
“This woman was part of Gulzar Ahmed Malik’s family and the man with her was her maternal uncle. They were living in this house and now they have gone somewhere. I don’t know where have they gone,” said Zulfiqar, a resident of the area.
The southern region of Punjab from which Tashfeen hailed has long been associated with Sufism, a mystical form of Islam whose adherents worship with song and dance, attend shrines and devote themselves to historic saints — practices viewed as heretical by more orthodox Muslims
Indeed, according to Mohammad Jamil, a neighbour of Tashfeen’s father, one of Tashfeen’s uncles himself was a Sufi devotional singer.
“We don’t want Muslims to do such things. Such people should be punished, must be punished,” said Jamil of Tashfeen, adding: “She has dishonoured Pakistan.”
It is still not clear where Tashfeen became radicalised, but by the time she returned to Pakistan in 2007 to pursue a degree in pharmacology at the Bahauddin Zakariya University that lasted till 2013, she was devoutly religious and wore a veil, according to former instructors.
“She was not outspoken or ultra-modern but she was religious minded, polite and submissive,” said Dr Khalid Hussain Janbaz, chair of the pharmacy department.
A fellow student who requested anonymity told AFP that Malik lived in university accommodation for two years before moving into a house with her mother and another sister, also a student.
“She would often watch religious TV programmes and attended religious lectures,” the student said, adding that Malik remained in touch with some of her friends via Facebook, and told one that she was pregnant
“She preferred to remain in veil or burqa throughout her stay in the university and provided veiled pictures for all her university documents,” said the student.
Pakistan’s government Sunday issued a statement condemning the attack, even as its interior minister said Islamabad could not be held responsible.
“We have contacted the US government and assured them we will provide them whatever legal assistance possible, if asked,” Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan told reporters in Islamabad.
But, he added: “A country or a national or a religion cannot be held responsible for a crime committed by an individual and I appreciate a wise approach adopted by the US administration on the issue.”
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