San Bernardino: Investigations into the money trail of the California shooting suspects has revealed that the couple borrowed a sizeable amount of money sometime before the attack. The suspect couple in the mass shooting that claimed 14 lives reportedly borrowed about $28,000 from an online lender about two weeks before they carried out the attack, sources said.
Syed Rizwan Farook, 28, borrowed the amount from San Francisco-based Prosper, a peer-to-peer lending service, investigators probing details of the money trail have found.
Farook, the US-born son of Pakistani immigrants, and his Pakistani-born wife, Tashfeen Malik, 29, were described by the Federal Bureau of Investigation as a couple "radicalized" by Islamic extremist ideology.
27-year-old Tashfeen Malik is also said to have sworn allegiance to the leader of militant group Islamic State. Tashfeen is believed to have spent a sizeable amount of time in Saudi Arabia before she arrived to the US with her husband.
Experts do not deny the possibility of Farook and Malik following a pattern set by other militants – that of draining their bank accounts and exhausting their credit lines before embarking on what they believed would be a suicide mission.
Prosper, a San Francisco-based online lender, made a $28,500 collateral-free loan to Farook in mid-November. Loans made by Prosper, which processes borrowers' applications and evaluates their credit-worthiness, are originated by the third-party bank WebBank, based in Salt Lake City. Prosper then sells its loans to investors.
A deposit of $28,500 was made into Farook's bank account from WebBank.com on Nov. 18, and Farook converted $10,000 in cash, which he withdrew from a Union Bank branch in San Bernardino around Nov. 20, Fox News reported on Monday. At least three $5,000 transfers were made in the days before the shooting, apparently to Farook's mother, the report added.
A pair of rifles, semi-automatic handguns, thousands of rounds of ammunition, explosives and other materials for making as many as 19 pipe bombs were recovered from the couple after the attacks, the FBI said.
Authorities say the heavily armed couple opened fire on Farook's co-workers from the county environmental health department during a holiday party at the Inland Regional Center social services agency in San Bernardino, about 60 miles (100 km) east of Los Angeles.
Fourteen people were killed and 21 others were wounded in the assault. The couple died several hours later in a shootout with police.
