Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik, who opened fire on a San Bernardino holiday party earlier this month, were on Tuesday buried in a quiet, graveside funeral guarded by FBI agents.
Many of those who attended mosque with the couple refused to attend, two mosque members said.
US-born Farook, 28, and his Pakistani-born wife Malik, 29, killed 14 people and injured 21, in what US officials have called a terrorist attack. They died later that day in a gun battle with police.
Photo: US Customs and Border Protection via AP
The funeral followed traditional Islamic rituals, said an attendee. At a Muslim cemetery hours away from San Bernardino, the bodies were cleansed according to Islamic rules, wrapped in white cloth and buried.
The funeral attendee and another person familiar with the situation, both of whom asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation, said it took a week to find a graveyard willing to accept the bodies.
They said the husband and wife were ultimately buried in a cemetery far from San Bernardino, after a closer facility refused to take the bodies because of fears the graves would be desecrated. Neither person would identify the cemetery where the couple was buried.
Muslims are usually buried within 24 hours of dying, but family members and community members had to wait for the bodies to be released by law enforcement officials and then for permission from a cemetery.
Neither source would say which cemetery refused to bury the couple, but a woman at the Islamic Cemetery and Masjid in Adelanto, California — less than an hour from San Bernardino — confirmed the cemetery had refused to bury the bodies, in part out of fear of a backlash, but also for “other reasons.” She declined to give her name.
About 10 people went to the funeral, the attendee said, including members of Farook’s family and people who used to pray with him at mosques in San Bernardino County.
However, most Muslims in the community refused to participate in the burial or perform the funeral prayer, called Salat al-Janazah, a source who did not attend the funeral said.
“I don’t forgive him myself,” said the mosque-goer who did not attend the funeral.
Still, he added: “I pray mercy for him, and we Muslims know God is merciful. But he’s also just.”
The head of the FBI on Wednesday said there is no evidence the couple were part of a terrorist cell, confirming that investigators believe the pair were inspired, but not directed by the Islamic State.
The Islamist militant group has “revolutionized” terrorism by seeking to inspire such small-scale attacks, FBI Director James Comey said, adding that the group uses social media, encrypted communications and slickly produced propaganda to recruit followers internationally.
“Your parents’ al-Qaeda was a very different model than the threat we face today,” Comey told a counterterrorism conference in New York.
However, he said that while Farook and Malik had expressed support for “jihad and martyrdom” in private communications as early as 2013, they never did so publicly on social media.
He also said authorities believe Mohammed Abdulazeez, the suspect in July’s fatal shooting of four US Marines and a Navy sailor in Chattanooga, Tennessee, was radicalized by militant propaganda.
In related news, US President Barack Obama is to travel today to San Bernardino, the White House said on Wednesday.
Obama is to meet privately with families of the victims, White House spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters.
His visit to San Bernardino would be “patterned after” a similar trip to Roseburg, Oregon, in October where he met for about an hour with families of victims of a shooting at a community college there, Earnest said.
Obama is scheduled stop in San Bernardino on his way to Hawaii, where he plans to spend the holidays with his family.
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