Department of Justice officials announced Monday the FBI has obtained evidence linking the gunman who shot and killed three people and wounded eight at Pensacola, Florida's Naval Air Station last year to Al Qaeda.
CNN and The New York Times on Monday reported that investigators discovered ties between the Pensacola shooting suspect, Mohammed Alshamrani, and Al Qaeda after breaking through his iPhones' encryption, and Attorney General William Barr and FBI Director Christopher Wray subsequently confirmed the development in a news conference.
"The phones contained information previously unknown to us that definitively establishes Alshamrani's significant ties to Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, not only before the attack, but before he even arrived in the United States," Barr said.
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The Department of Justice in January called the Pensacola shooting an "act of terrorism," saying that Alshamrani, a Royal Saudi Air Force member, was motivated by "jihadist ideology." On Monday, Wray said Alshamrani had been "connecting and associating with a number of dangerous" Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula operatives and talked with AQAP in the months prior to the attack. Wray also called the shooting the "brutal culmination of years of planning and preparation by a longtime AQAP associate."
The Justice Department previously asked Apple for help in decrypting the shooter's two iPhones, but Wray on Monday said that the FBI received "effectively no help from Apple" and that "unfortunately, the technique that we developed" to access the phones "is not a fix for our broader Apple problem" because of its "pretty limited application."
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