Dec. 11--The brother of San Bernardino killer Tashfeen Malik said members of his family in Saudi Arabia are devastated by the attack last week that left 14 people dead and several wounded.
"It's a disaster for our life," said Saad Gulzar Malik, who lives in Riyadh, the Saudi capital, where his sister spent part of her life before moving to the United States in 2014.
"We don't have any idea about what happened over there," Malik said in a phone interview Friday. "We are only learning about it from news reports."
Malik said his father, who lives in the coastal city of Jeddah, has been questioned by Saudi intelligence officials about the deadly rampage his sister carried out with her U.S.-born husband, Syed Rizwan Farook.
The couple opened fire Dec. 2 at a holiday party at San Bernardino's Inland Regional Center, hours before dying in a gun battle with police.
U.S. officials say the pair were inspired by foreign extremist organizations, including Islamic State, but have yet to piece together exactly when and where the two were radicalized or whether they had support from anybody else.
The investigation has spanned continents, from the suburban Redlands community where the couple lived with their infant child, to Pakistan, where Tashfeen Malik once studied at a conservative religious school. Investigators are also looking at Malik's ties in Saudi Arabia, where she is believed to have spent much of her childhood and adolescence, and where she first met her husband after getting to know him on an online dating website for Muslims.
Saudi Arabia, which is dominated by a conservative branch of Islam that some say has contributed to the rise of violent fundamentalism in the Middle East, has struggled to contain terrorism in the past.
The country, a longtime U.S. ally, came under scrutiny in 2001 after 15 of the 9/11 hijackers were found to be from there. Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of those attacks, was born in Riyadh.
