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Terror in Suburban California; Belgian Police Release New Information on Paris Attacks; ISIS Threatens Russian Interests in Thailand; Battle of the Strongman Presidents; Deadly Flooding in India. Aired 2-2:30a ET

Aired December 5, 2015 - 02:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

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NATALIE ALLEN, CNN ANCHOR (voice-over): Terror in suburban California, as investigators trace links between the San Bernardino attackers and Islamist extremism. We find out more about the elusive woman who could have been the catalyst.

Battle of the strongman presidents. Why Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdogan won't back down from a dangerous feud.

And a city submerged: the latest on the deadly flooding in India.

It's all ahead here on CNN NEWSROOM. Thank you for joining us. I'm Natalie Allen.

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ALLEN: U.S. investigators now say they are looking at Wednesday's mass shooting in California as an act of terrorism. Just a short time ago, they evacuated a UPS facility there after a delivery driver realized he had a package for the killers. We don't know what was in it but police now say nothing was a threat.

Meantime, the FBI says it uncovered evidence from the home of Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife that showed extreme planning. Authorities also say Malik posted a pledge of allegiance to ISIS during the massacre but no one has said the terror group ordered the attack.

Some members of Farook's mosque suspect his wife is the one who radicalized him. Friends say the man they didn't know much about her but believe the man they worshipped with was a good guy. Here's CNN's Kyung Lah with that story.

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KYUNG LAH, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Investigators are homing in on Tashfeen Malik, the wife and second shooter in the San Bernardino attack that claimed the lives of 14 people. Three U.S. officials familiar with the investigation say as the massacre was happening, Malik posted on Facebook a pledge of allegiance to ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. She's a woman few members of the Islamic center in riverside remember.

That's the mosque Syed Rizwan Farook attended and celebrated his marriage to his wife last year.

LAH: The service was in this room?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes.

LAH: And so the women then were up there?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes, up there. Yes. Right, right, up there.

LAH (voice-over): Women are separated from the men in this mosque. So even Mustafa Kukul (ph), the director of the Islamic center, never met Malik. She's a mystery to many here, including those who knew her best. According to attorneys for the Farook family, Syed's brothers never saw her face.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Men did not interact with her and the brothers did not actually ever see her face. They've never seen her face because she did wear a burqa.

LAH (voice-over): The couple first met like many today, on the Web. Farook had joined dating websites. He came across Malik, a Pakistani citizen. He turned to Kukul (ph) for marital advice.

MUSTAFA KUKUL (PH), DIRECTOR, ISLAMIC CENTER: He said, I feel comfortable with this person. And I believe she is a good woman. She's a decent woman. She's a religious woman.

LAH (voice-over): Kukul (ph) says Farook flew to Saudi Arabia to meet Malik for the first time in October 2013 during the hajj pilgrimage. DHS sources tell CNN Malik's father lived in Saudi Arabia. So she often visited over the years from Pakistan. He went again to Saudi Arabia in June 2014.

Documents show she entered the U.S. a month later. Their marriage certificate filed in Riverside County says they were legally married in August of that year. Members of the mosque first met Malik at their wedding ceremony, held here. Abdul Aziz Ahmed (ph), Farook's friend, was among the 300 who attended the wedding.

ABDUL AZIZ AHMED (PH), FAROOK'S FRIEND: When she come here, also she -- he looks good. He was looking good.

LAH: And then he disappeared?

AHMED (PH): He disappeared, yes.

LAH (voice-over): After coming to this mosque every day for two years, Farook stopped.

AHMED (PH): How can this happen?

A guy who was very good, he doesn't have any problem with anybody. You don't hear him talking about those madmen, like those crazy terrorists. He never talk about those kind of people.

LAH: Did the marriage change him?

AHMED (PH): I suspect. I suspect there is something wrong.

LAH (voice-over): Farook's co-worker, Christian Wadiki (ph), tells CBS News he's certain the marriage changed Farook.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Do you believe that he was radicalized?

CHRISTIAN WADIKI (PH), FAROOK'S CO-WORKER: Yes, by the wife. I think he married a terrorist.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: He married a terrorist?

WADIKI (PH): Yes.

LAH (voice-over): Most puzzling, say friends, Farook would be a good father and would have wanted to live a life with a family.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I don't understand.

How can a woman just leave her baby like this and go do some crap like this?

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ALLEN: Kyung Lah with that story from Riverside there.

Well, back at the couple's home in Redlands, the media got a first- hand look at how they lived. Their landlord let us in for a tour after the FBI cleared the scene. Stephanie Elam shows us.

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STEPHANIE ELAM, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Unfinished food --

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ELAM (voice-over): -- on the counter, broken glass on the living room floor. This is the townhouse that was shared by San Bernardino mass shooters Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik. Signs of a former crime scene mixed with baby toys for their 6-month-old daughter.

In a room upstairs, the baby's crib is to one side. A small desk with a computer is in another corner. The back bedroom holding more clues about the family.

I was the first person to walk into this room and saw how it was before everyone started touching it. And you can see that police did go through and look at many things. I don't want to show you these IDs over here just because I don't want to show you those addresses that are on there. But I do believe that they belong to the mother of Farook, based on the ages that are. But you can see that there are some prayer books. There are also some pictures. When I first walked in, this group of prayer beads was sitting right

here on the edge of the bed when I walked in as well. Several prayer books that were all around the side of the bed here. Some business cards and plenty of the normal trappings that you would expect to see in a bedroom.

You have this -- you know, I see receipts for stores, normal store purchases. I see lotions and creams and dressers and that sort of thing.

But one of the things, and I want -- there's so much media in here, but I want to show you, one of the things that you can see here is this. And this is what I was telling you about before, is this right here.

If you look up here, you can see where they smashed up into the ceiling to take a look to see what was up there. It does appear, based on how much debris is on the ground, that there -- there was an -- that there was an effort to get up there and make sure that they checked every crevice of this back bedroom.

And it does seems like it may have been the main bedroom that was here.

But plenty of IDs. I've seen passports. I've seen driver's licenses, Social Security cards, plenty of things that are around here, as well as plenty of signs of faith. A lot of signs of faith here.

You see a lot of signs of these being people who believed in their faith and also referencing it.

There's stickers and so forth all throughout the room. But a lot of paperwork and also a lot of luggage up here as well, too. But it just looks like it's been stashed over in the corner. But definitely signs that this has been a room that has been ransacked by -- not -- before the media got here, but by the police as well.

Doyle Miller, the landlord of the property, invited the media inside. A surprising move, because the investigation is still in the early stages.

DOYLE MILLER, LANDLORD: I need to assess the damage. It's a lot worse than what I thought.

ELAM (voice-over): But the FBI under fire for allowing the landlord and media to enter the home, explained they were no longer responsible for the apartment since they released it last night.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We executed a search warrant on that apartment and last night we turned that over, back to the residents. Once the residents have the apartment and we're not in it anymore, we don't control it.

ELAM: There was a lot of speculation about the garage to this house. We understand there are reports that the couple may have been building pipe bombs inside of the garage. Well, I walked around it. There was no way to get in it and there was no signs of that activity within the household -- Stephanie Elam, CNN, Redlands, California.

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ALLEN: The exact motive for the massacre remains unclear but an attorney representing the Farook family says the current political climate in the U.S. is unfairly labeling Muslims in a negative light.

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UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We're talking about political candidates that could likely be our next president, who are saying things like we should register all Muslims and that mosques should be investigated and looked into or that the families of terrorists should be killed without due process.

Or the latest thing that was said was that it was known that it was a terrorist act that was committed simply because the person had an Islamic last name.

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ALLEN: A Muslim national spokesman is also defending his faith. He says it's important to remember that leaders in his community are actively condemning violence and promoting peace.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It's really about the -- these are all acts of terror that are happening in our country. And so we should talk about not just the labels but the solutions.

How do we stop groups like daish?

How do we stop these mass shootings that are crippling our nation?

And our point of view is that leadership matters, look at the leaders who are guiding these people in a certain direction, especially these disturbed people and which is why we would say, look at case studies like, for example, the Khalifa (ph) of Islam, His Holiness, who is the spiritual leader of the Ahmadiyya (ph) Muslim community, who spends a lot of time playing an active role in the lives of tens millions of Muslims in 207 countries around the world on how to embody peace and love as opposed to brutality and injustice.

And so there's something to be said there.

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ALLEN: Well, through their attorney, Farook's family says they did not know the couple held radical views and they had no idea why they burst into the party for Farook's coworkers and viciously opened fire.

Well, as we've been reporting, the couple used rifles and semiautomatic hand guns that were legally obtained. But despite that, the massacre has reignited the gun reform debate in the U.S. Earlier I spoke with Professor Robert Spitzer, a distinguished scholar and author of five books on U.S. gun --

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ALLEN: -- policy, including this one, "Guns across America." He told me the current political environment makes it nearly impossible on a national level to change gun laws.

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ROBERT SPITZER, AUTHOR: In recent months, for example, gun rights supporters, in speaking about these mass shootings that have occurred with such depressing regularity, have talked immediately about the need for better mental health help, because many of the people who have committed these mass shootings clearly have serious mental problems.

And while the mental health issue is certainly an important one and it's perfectly appropriate to talk about, those who raised this issue first have taken no steps to actually do anything to improve mental health counseling and everything else in the United States.

It's a way to track attention away from guns. I mean, we would have crime without guns; crime exists without guns. Murders would exist without guns. But when you bring the two together, guns and crime, it is too often a lethal mix. And it's not just the presence of guns.

It's the abundance of a wide range of weaponry that goes to the easy availability of too many types of guns and too much firepower in the hands of average citizens.

ALLEN: Right. We're seeing the guns on the screen, we've seen the bullets, up to 7,000 rounds.

So what is the answer?

A lot of people are pointing to Australia, that a conservative government passed legislation and they've seen no mass shootings since then.

SPITZER: Yes. In 1996, after the Port Arthur massacre, the Australian government, as you know, enacted a vigorous campaign to bring in all -- bring in assault-type weapons. It was a successful campaign and they've had no mass shootings since that time.

That kind of effort would be very difficult in the United States but that doesn't mean there isn't anything you could do. There are many steps that could be taken in the United States, policy steps that overwhelming majorities of Americans support, that most gun owners support.

But in the current political environment where, at the national level, Congress is firmly in control, is controlled by the Republican Party, which is closely aligned with the National Rifle Association, the chief gun rights group, and President Obama, the Democrat, it's abundantly clear that the current Congress is not interested really in any proposals from Obama on almost any policy matter, but certainly not on the gun issue.

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ALLEN: Robert Spitzer talking with me earlier.

So let's look at how the United States compares with other countries in homicides by gun.

According to the Small Arms Survey, the U.S. has an average annual rate of 31 homicides by gun for every 1 million people. Compare that to Germany, France and Australia, each with just 2 for every million people. The U.S. falls below some other countries like Brazil and South Africa but it has a higher rate than Russia.

Despite President Obama's plea for tougher gun laws, there's little he can do on his own and here's why. The Second Amendment to the Constitution protects Americans' right to keep and bear arms, a right staunchly defended by gun advocates.

In addition to federal gun laws, there are also many state and local gun laws which vary widely across the country. And any change would likely need approval from U.S. lawmakers, who are reluctant to take on the powerful gun lobby led by the NRA, the National Rifle Association.

Ahead here, police in Belgium release new information related to the Paris terrorist attacks Friday. We'll let you know what we know about two new suspects.

Plus, Southern India, we'll look at the forecast there as they have had to deal with all of this, more than a month of killer flooding.

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ALLEN: Officials in Belgium now have two more suspects they're searching for in the deadly Paris attacks. Authorities are looking for two men who had connections to the suspect known as the eighth attacker. CNN's Alexandra Field has more.

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ALEXANDRA FIELD, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Salah Abdeslam remains the man most wanted by police in connection to the Paris terror attacks but authorities are now looking for two men who were traveling with him in Hungary just two months before the attacks. All three men were stopped at the Austrian-Hungarian border.

Officials say that, at the time, two men presented false Belgian identity cards with the names Soufiane Kayal and Samir Bouzid. Police later raided a house that was rented out using the identity card with Kayal's name on it.

They now say that the identity card with Bouzid's name on it was used just four days after the Paris attacks to wire money to Hasna Aitboulahcen, she's one of the women who was killed in the police raids following the attacks.

She's the cousin of Abdelhamid Abaaoud, who is widely regarded as the ringleader of those attacks. As for Abdeslam himself, authorities have said that he managed to leave France on the night of the attacks just hours later, crossing the border into Belgium, before police realized who exactly they were looking for.

A friend of Abdeslam has said that he dropped him off in a Brussels neighborhood of Schaerbeek but officials haven't been able to determine where Abdeslam went from there. In Paris, Alexandra Field, CNN.

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ALLEN: When Russia joined the fray in the Syrian civil war two months ago with airstrikes, many said it ran the risk of making itself a prime target for attacks. ISIS has yet to strike on Russian soil but CNN's Kristie Lu Stout has the details on the threat to Russian interests in Thailand.

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KRISTIE LU STOUT, CNN ANCHOR: Thailand has been warned of an ISIS threat and the warning came from Russia. Russian intelligence has warned Thai authorities that 10 Syrian nationals with links to ISIS are inside Thailand with plans to attack Russian interests.

This came from a leaked letter that was widely circulated in Thai media. According to the memo, 10 unidentified suspects entered Thailand between October 15th to the 31st and then separated. Four traveled to Pattaya, two to Phuket and two stayed in Bangkok. And the whereabouts of the remaining two -- unknown. The Thai deputy spokesman says the leaked memo is real and action is being taken.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through translator): About the security issue at the embassies, we have kept security up, as is a regular practice. As mentioned in the memo, we will step up more security and keep monitoring the situation and will work with all concerned units.

STOUT: Thailand is entering its big holiday season and destinations like Phuket and Pattaya are very popular with Russian tourists. Confirmation that ISIS militants are inside the country will no doubt send shockwaves to the Thai tourist industry, already reeling from the August bomb attack in Bangkok that killed 20 people -- Kristie Lu Stout, CNN.

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ALLEN: Iraq is demanding that Turkey remove its forces near the city of Mosul. Turkey says its troops have been deployed to provide training for the Iraqi soldiers but the Iraqi government said Turkish troops moved in without request.

Iraq's prime minister tweeted this Saturday, "The unauthorized presence of Turkish troops in Mosul Province is a serious breach of Iraqi sovereignty."

Well, once seen as allies, Russian president Vladimir Putin and Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan continue to trade barbs over Turkey's downing of a Russian fighter jet last month. Putin warns that Turkey will regret its actions while Erdogan accuses Russia of slander.

As Matthew Chance reports, the similarities between these two leaders is only fueling the crisis between their countries.

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MATTHEW CHANCE, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): It was a bromance destined never to last. The czar and the sultan, two leaders --

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CHANCE (voice-over): -- accused of being autocrats, with strong nationalist tendencies, both unwilling to back down or lose face.

Russia and Turkey had long been at loggerheads over Syria. But this was the moment now defining that relationship. The shoot-down of a Russian plane by Turkish interceptors, setting Putin and Erdogan on a collision course.

A furious Russian president called it "a stab in the back, delivered by the accomplices of terrorists." He demanded an immediate apology, which never came.

Instead, bristling at the Kremlin insults, the Turkish leader called for Russia to say sorry. It was, after all, Turkish airspace, he told CNN, that was violated. That apology was never going to happen, either.

CHANCE: Analysts say the similarities between these two leaders, their refusal to be pushed around, no matter how high the stakes, is fueling the crisis between the two countries.

The Kremlin has imposed economic sanctions on Turkey, banning charter flights and food imports as well as freezing a multibillion-dollar gas pipeline deal. But the Russian revenge has become extremely personal, too, with President Erdogan firmly in President Putin's sights.

CHANCE (voice-over): It's the Turkish leader, says Moscow, that is benefitting from this, the illegal trade in oil from areas controlled by ISIS in Syria and Iraq.

In a rare briefing to the international media, Russia's defense ministry showed what it said was evidence of Turkey's complicity: images of hundreds of oil tankers crossing into Turkish territory in what defense officials called Erdogan's amazing family business.

It's an allegation President Erdogan has strenuously denied, vowing to resign if proved true. But Kremlin analysts say it's really the crime of disloyalty that Putin will never forgive. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: So once you've shown disloyalty, you are written off as a partner.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: And Erdogan was disloyal.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: And Erdogan was disloyal to Putin and Russia. The two are inseparable in this situation. And he had to be punished.

CHANCE (voice-over): And that punishment may have only just begun, as these two leaders, the czar and the sultan, once seen as close, even similar, lock egos and test each other's resolve -- Matthew Chance, CNN, Moscow.

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ALLEN: Historic flooding has devastated parts of South India and the rain isn't stopping. Derek Van Dam will have the latest on this story for you next.

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ALLEN: This is Southern India and more rain is expected after weeks of heavy flooding have ravaged this region. The floods are the worst in more than a century in Tamil Nadu state and they have killed more than 270 people since October.

The Indian prime minister is pledging almost $300 million in relief for the area. And after a brief pause in the heavy rain --

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ALLEN: -- forecasters like Derek, who's here with us, are expecting more rain.

Just so many people have died.

DEREK VAN DAM, AMS METEOROLOGIST: Yes, it's been horrific to think about how catastrophic this has been for Southern India. But this brief lull in the precipitation has allowed for rescuers to actually take care of about 120,000 people stranded on rooftops, for instance. And it's all thanks to this flooding that's inundating buildings and turning roadways into virtual rivers --

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VAN DAM: That's right, that's right and lakes, as well.

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ALLEN: Wouldn't want to be too close but it's pretty cool, isn't it?

VAN DAM: Pretty cool to report on, too. Love it. ALLEN: All right, Derek, thank you.

We'll be right back with more of our top stories.