Pakistan woman involved in California shooting may have come to India in 2013

NEW DELHI: The Pakistani woman involved in the California mass shooting may have travelled to India from Saudi Arabia once in 2013, a Saudi interior ministry official was quoted as saying by the New York Times on Tuesday.
According to the report, Saudi interior ministry spokesman Mansour Turki said Tashfeen Malik had arrived in Saudi Arabia in June 2008 from Pakistan to visit her father and stayed for about nine weeks before returning to Pakistan.
"Then, in 2013, she arrived on June 8, from Pakistan, and departed for India on October 6 of the same year," Turki was quoted as saying. He, however, did not elaborate on whether she reached India and how long she stayed there.
Indian officials here claimed that the woman does not figure in the immigration records for 2013. "No visa was issued in Malik’s name and there is no record of her ever visiting India," a home ministry official told TOI. Another intelligence officer pointed out that even if Malik had visited India in 2013, "she would not have aroused any suspicion as there was no adverse record against her".
Saudi Arabia is purportedly under pressure to deny any links with the California shooting suspects. The NYT report claimed Saudi officials have denied the idea that Malik took up more fundamentalist views in Saudi Arabia, or that it played a role in her relationship with Syed Rizwan Farook, her husband who was shot dead along with her after they killed 14 people in the mass shooting incident.
"The Saudi narrative has varied to the extent that one official denied she had ever been there," the report said.
A day after the attack, a spokesman for the Saudi foreign ministry Osama Nugali had told NYT that while Farook had visited the kingdom only once, for nine days in 2014, there was no record of Malik having ever entered the kingdom. However, as per Turki’s claims, though there was "no evidence" that Malik had met her husband in the kingdom, they were in Saudi Arabia at the same time for about five days in October 2013.
Turki told NYT that Farook had visited Saudi Arabia twice, once for the Hajj pilgrimage in October, 2013, and once for an off-season Umraah pilgrimage for nine days in July, 2014. American officials reported that the couple flew to the US together from Jeddah in July, 2014.
The NYT report said that according to Malik's relatives and acquaintances in Pakistan, she had grown up in Saudi Arabia and had been influenced by its deeply conservative interpretation of Islam.
Malik had moved with her father, an engineer, from Punjab province in Pakistan to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, when she was a young child, the report said adding that from 2007 to around 2012, Malik studied in Multan where one faculty member recalled her as a "Saudi girl" because her religious observance was so much stricter than that of her peers.
She studied pharmacy at Bahauddin Zakariya University under a quota system that reserves spots for the children of expatriate Pakistanis, according to NYT.