TASHFEEN MALIK, SUSPECT IN CALIFORNIA ATTACK, REMAINS MYSTERY TO RELATIVES

[Ms. Malik moved to Saudi Arabia with her father when she was young, her relatives told reporters, after an inheritance dispute between her father and their extended family led to a bitter falling out. The relatives said they believed it was there that both father and daughter developed radical political and religious beliefs.]

By Liam Stack

Tashfeen Malik, the woman accused by law enforcement officials of killing 14 people and injuring 21 others in a California conference center alongside her husband Wednesday, remains largely a mystery to both investigators and her relatives in Pakistan, who have responded to her actions with shock and horror.

Officials said Ms. Malik pledged allegiance to the Islamic State group in a Facebook status posted on the day of the attack, but they cautioned that there was no evidence that the terrorist group had directed the rampage. There was little information about Ms. Malik’s past or her path to radicalization.

Relatives in Pakistan who spoke to reporters in the days after the attack described Ms. Malik, 29, as a bright and religious young woman who appeared to have a promising future.

They struggled to reconcile the woman they thought they knew with what the authorities said was a black-clad assailant who walked into the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino shortly after leaving her 6-month-old daughter with her mother-in-law. Hours after the rampage, Ms. Malik and her husband, Syed Rizwan Farook, were killed in a gun battle with the police.

 “All relatives here are shocked to hear about it,” said Javed Rabbani Aulakh, an uncle of Ms. Malik’s in Pakistan. He remembered her as the young woman who moved back to the country of her birth in 2007 to study pharmacology at Bahauddin Zakariya University. She was conservative, he said, but appeared to have no interest in extremism or violence.

Tashfeen Malik

Ms. Malik moved to Saudi Arabia with her father when she was young, her relatives told reporters, after an inheritance dispute between her father and their extended family led to a bitter falling out. The relatives said they believed it was there that both father and daughter developed radical political and religious beliefs.

“From what we heard, they lived differently, their mind-set is different,” Hifza Bibi, a stepsister of Ms. Malik’s father, told Reuters. She said the family was originally “from a land of Sufi saints,” a reference to a mystical and open-minded interpretation of Islam that is looked upon with scorn by more conservative or radical adherents of the faith.

However, a spokesman for the Saudi Interior Ministry, Maj. Gen. Mansour Turki, said by text message on Saturday that Ms. Malik did not live in Saudi Arabia but twice came to visit her father, who works in the kingdom, in 2008 and 2013. The reason for the discrepancy between the accounts of Ms. Malik’s relatives and the Saudi authorities was not immediately clear.

Ms. Bibi said that Ms. Malik’s father cut himself off from the rest of the family after he moved to Saudi Arabia.

“He doesn’t care about anyone here,” she said. “A man who didn’t come to attend his own mother’s funeral, what can you expect from him?”

Despite her father’s estrangement from relatives in Pakistan, Ms. Malik returned to the country in 2007 to pursue a degree in pharmacology at Bahauddin Zakariya University, in the city of Multan.

Nisar Hussain, one of Ms. Malik’s professors, said she had been a gifted student who at one point was at the top of her class in the university’s department of pharmacology, according to The Los Angeles Times.

“She was religious, but a very normal person as well,” said Dr. Hussain. “She was a very hard-working and submissive student. She never created any problem in the class. She was an obedient girl. I cannot even imagine she could murder people.”

He said he did not believe Ms. Malik “had any kind of mental illness.”

One relative, who spoke to The Los Angeles Times on the condition of anonymity, said that Ms. Malik’s religious beliefs seemed to change during her time at the university and that relatives sometimes worried about her radical postings on social media.

Ms. Malik also began to talk online with friends in Arabic, a language that her family members in Pakistan did not speak, according to the relative, who said they spoke Urdu and a dialect of Punjabi called Saraiki.

“None of our family members in Pakistan know Arabic, so we do not know what she used to discuss,” the relative said.

Ms. Malik left school in 2012 and moved to the United States two years later, after she met Mr. Farook, an American citizen living in California, on a dating website. She applied for and was granted a K-1 visa, also known as the fiancé visa, in Pakistan in July 2014 and traveled to the United States that month.

Julia Preston contributed reporting.

@ The New York Times