The Saudi national who carried out a deadly mass shooting in Florida last year was a member of al Qaeda, Attorney General William Barr announced Monday.
The gunman, identified by the FBI as Mohammed Saeed Alshamrani, a second lieutenant in the Royal Saudi Air Force, shot and killed three U.S. Navy sailors, Ensign Joshua Kaleb Watson, 23, Airman Mohammed Haitham, 19, and Airman Apprentice Cameron Walters, 21, and wounded at least eight others at Naval Air Station Pensacola. Alshamrani was killed by officers responding to the attack.
The attorney general said during a press conference that the FBI finally succeeded in breaking the iPhone encryptions and noted the phones contained information which “definitively establishes Alshamrani’s connections to al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.”
In January, Barr announced the attack was an act of jihadist-motivated terrorism. In February, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula claimed responsibility for the Pensacola shooting and praised Alshamrani as a “martyr.”
Barr said earlier this year that Apple had declined the Justice Department’s request for help in unlocking the shooter’s phones. Barr noted on Monday that “four months ago I announced that this shooting was an act of terrorism” and that the FBI had obtained court orders for Alshamrani’s devices within one day of the shooting.
“Unfortunately, Apple would not help us unlock the phones,” Barr said, condemning Apple’s decision not to help the FBI unlock the terrorist’s encrypted phones.
Barr said Alshamrani was connected to the deadly terrorist group not just before the attack, but even before he arrived in the United States. The attorney general said that “information from the phones has already proved invaluable” as he pointed to a successful overseas counterterrorism operation to kill Alshamrani’s compatriot in Yemen — Abdullah al Maliki.
“Thanks to the great work of the FBI, and no thanks to Apple, we were able to unlock Alshamrani’s phones,” Barr said. “The trove of information found on these phones has proven to be invaluable to this ongoing investigation and critical to the security of the American people. … The bottom line: Our national security cannot remain in the hands of big corporations who put dollars over lawful access and public safety.”
FBI Director Christopher Wray said Monday that “this is an important moment in an important case” but also emphasized that “we received effectively no help from Apple.”
Wray said the evidence on the phones shows the Pensacola attack “was actually the brutal culmination of years of planning by an AQAP associate.” Wray said that Alshamrani was radicalized in 2015 or earlier and had been associating with AQAP for years. The FBI director said Alshamrani was “a determined AQAP terrorist who spent years planning to attack us.”
Alshamrani expressed a desire to learn how to fly and came to the U.S. to train for a “special operation,” the FBI director said. Wray called Alshamrani’s planning meticulous, pointing to pocket cam videos he took casing buildings on the air base and to a will the terrorist put together, which AQAP released two months later.
FBI technical experts said they unearthed evidence showing Alshamrani and his AQAP associates deliberately communicated using end-to-end encrypted apps with warrant-proof encryption in order to evade law enforcement and that Alshamrani’s terrorist-attack preparations began years ago.
Wray said Alshamrani continued to confer with his AQAP associates up until the night of the shooting.
Wray also praised the three Navy sailors killed by Alshamrani. “They died for our country, and they died as heroes,” he said.
Haitham and Walters received posthumous promotions.
“As we continue to seek answers around the Dec. 6 terrorist attack that killed three American service members and wounded others, I want their families, and all Americans, to know that protecting the United States from those who seek to do us harm remains the FBI’s foremost priority,” Wray said.
During the 15-minute mass shooting, Alshamrani shouted criticisms of U.S. troops overseas, shot a photograph of President Trump, and tried to destroy his two iPhones.
Alshamrani was shot and killed by responding deputies from the Escambia County Sheriff’s Office. The FBI had quickly announced its investigation was treating the mass shooting as a possible act of terrorism.
Barr said earlier this year that “the evidence shows that the shooter was motivated by jihadist ideology.”
On Sept. 11, the Saudi national posted on social media that “the countdown has begun,” and over his Thanksgiving break, he visited the 9/11 memorial in New York City.
Barr said early reports about other Saudi cadets aiding the attacker were untrue. “There is no evidence of assistance or pre-knowledge of the attack by the Saudis,” Barr said.
“The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia gave complete and total support to our counterterrorism investigation,” Barr said. “They ordered all Saudi trainees to fully cooperate.” Barr said that during the investigation, “We did learn of derogatory material possessed by 21 Saudi trainees,” including 17 people who had shared “jihadi or anti-American content” and 15 people, including some of the 17, who had contact with child pornography.
“None of them would, in a normal course, result in federal prosecution,” Barr said.
Barr said that after consultation with the Saudi government, “The 21 cadets have been disenrolled from their training program and will be returning to Saudi Arabia today,” and Saudi Arabia will review them under its code of military justice.
The Pentagon said Alshamrani began his U.S.-based courses in English, aviation, and basic pilot training in 2017 and was supposed to finish this August. He was one of more than 850 Saudi nationals in the U.S. for military training as part of a security agreement with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Overall, there were more than 5,100 foreign students from 153 different countries in the U.S. as part of the specialized military training program.
Last spring, Alshamrani filed a complaint against one of his instructors, who jokingly referred to him by the nickname “Porn Stache.” Alshamrani showed mass shooting videos during a dinner party the week of the shooting, and a Twitter account believed to belong to Alshamrani expressed extremist and stridently anti-American views, including a tweet which echoed Osama bin Laden: “The security is a shared destiny … You will not be safe until we live it as reality in [Palestine] and American troops get out of our land.”
In the wake of the shooting, Trump tweeted that “King Salman of Saudi Arabia just called to express his sincere condolences and give his sympathies to the families and friends of the warriors who were killed and wounded in the attack,” and “the Saudi people are greatly angered by the barbaric actions of the shooter.”
The massive Pensacola air base houses thousands of sailors and airmen. In addition to the Naval Education and Training Command as well as the Naval Aerospace Medical Institute, it is the home of the Navy’s Flight Demonstration Squadron, the Blue Angels.
