For the past few days, Tashfeen Malik has been the flavor of the hour in press reports about the San Bernardino shootings as folks have slowly realized it was her who was the radicalized element in this murderous couple. It appears that the wife converted her husband. As tmatt said very early on of this case, it was likely that, "all roads lead to Saudi Arabia."
Here’s what the Los Angeles Times had right up top on Sunday:
Tashfeen Malik, the 29-year-old female shooter in the deadly San Bernardino rampage, was a onetime "modern girl" who became religious during college and then began posting extremist messages on Facebook after arriving in the U.S., a family member in Pakistan told the Los Angeles Times.
The family member, in Malik's hometown of Karor Lal Esan who asked to not be identified, said Malik's postings on Facebook were a source of concern for her family.
"After a couple of years in college, she started becoming religious. She started taking part in religious activities and also started asking women in the family and the locality to become good Muslims. She started taking part in religious activities of women in the area,” the family member told The Times.
"She used to talk to somebody in Arabic at night on the Internet. None of our family members in Pakistan know Arabic, so we do not know what she used to discuss," the family member said. The family speaks Urdu and a dialect of Punjabi known as Saraiki.
If you look up at the bylines, you see three reporters and a dateline of Islamabad. Somehow they found the village this woman was from, got a translator and dug up the relatives.
Read further down in the story, and you’ll see they’re quoting from a Pakistani TV channel, from BBC, various friends at their San Bernardino mosque, the family attorney, a Pakistani who lives near Karor Lal Esan who claimed he knew the family well and that they were “extremist;” plus anyone else the Times could dig up.
What resulted was a lengthy narrative with three lead reporters and 31 contributors.
Yes, 31.