Tennessee killer's past sifted

CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. -- Federal investigators on Friday began examining the background of the 24-year-old gunman who killed four Marines in an attack on two military sites in Chattanooga, going through his computer and cellphone and focusing on trips he took outside the U.S.

A senior intelligence official said the investigators, led by the FBI, were trying to determine whether the gunman had been in touch with any extremist groups before or during a seven-month trip to Jordan last year. Officials said Thursday that they were investigating the attacks as a possible act of terrorism.

Authorities identified the gunman as Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez of Hixson, Tenn. The correct spelling of his name was still in dispute, with federal officials and records giving at least four variations.

Edward Reinhold, the agent in charge of the FBI's Knoxville division, did not address specific trips abroad by Abdulazeez but said at a news conference Friday, "We are exploring all travel he has done, and we have asked our intelligence partners throughout the world to provide us with any information they may have as to travel and activities."

Before his stay in Jordan last year, Abdulazeez, who made the trip on a U.S. passport, had traveled at least four other times to the country, said federal law enforcement officials, who were not authorized to speak about the investigation.

He was in Jordan in the last weeks of 2005, in the summer of 2008, the summer of 2010 and the spring of 2013, officials said. Those stays ranged from two weeks to two months.

In 2013, he also spent some time in Canada, returning to the United States in May, the officials said. They offered no information about a reason for the trips.

"This attack raises several questions about whether he was directed by someone or whether there's enough propaganda out there to motivate him to do this," said the senior intelligence official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the investigation was still underway.

Officials often look at international travel in terrorism cases because training in terrorist camps in Pakistan or Afghanistan has been seen as a crucial step in developing a plot. But a federal official said there was no indication Abdulazeez's trips were connected with the plot, and the attack in Tennessee would have required no specialized training, he said.

"It would be premature to speculate on exactly why the shooter did what he did," Reinhold said. "However, we are conducting a thorough investigation to determine whether this person acted alone, was inspired or directed."

Jordan, headed by a pro-American government, is not considered a training ground for terrorism groups. Authorities in the country said Abdulazeez traveled there last year to visit a maternal uncle.

A U.S. official said U.S. intelligence officials were contacting authorities in Jordan and Kuwait, where Abdulazeez was born, to see if they had any information about him.

Federal agents also took Abdulazeez's computer and cellphone back to Washington to comb through them for evidence about whom he had been in contact with and about what.

Investigators said Friday that they had come across recent blog posts in which he complained "life is short and bitter" and that Muslims should "submit to Allah." But the investigators, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation, cautioned that those statements did not indicate a pending attack on the military.

On the gunman's blog there were a number of entries dealing with Islam and jihad.

"Every one of them [the Companions of the Prophet Muhammad] fought Jihad for the sake of Allah," reads one recent post. "Every one of them had to make sacrifices in their lives and some even left all their wealth to make hijrah to Medina."

Says another recent post: "This life we are living is nothing more than a test of our faith and patience. It was designed to separate the inhabitants of Paradise from the inhabitants of Hellfire, and to rank amongst them the best of the best and worst of the worst. Don't let the society we live in deviate you from the task at hand."

barrage, then pursuit

Thursday's attacks began about 10:45 a.m. at a recruiting center on Lee Highway in Chattanooga where five branches of the military have adjoining offices in a strip mall. Abdulazeez unleashed a barrage of more than two dozen rounds there, but no one was injured, officials said.

Then, pursued by Chattanooga police officers, Abdulazeez raced to a Navy and Marine reserve facility about 7 miles away on Amnicola Highway and opened fire there. It was at the second location, a fenced-in campus with a building and a tree-lined parking lot, where the Marines and the gunman died.

The four Marines were identified Friday as Gunnery Sgt. Thomas Sullivan of Springfield, Mass.; Sgt. Carson Holmquist of Polk, Wis.; Lance Cpl. Squire Wells of Cobb, Ga.; and Staff Sgt. David Wyatt of Burke County, N.C. Wyatt was a 1998 graduate of Russellville High School in Arkansas.

A sailor seriously wounded in the attack remained hospitalized, officials said.

Abdulazeez was killed in a gunfight at the Navy and Marine reserve facility, but an autopsy will offer more details, officials said.

"All indications are that he was killed by fire from the Chattanooga police officers," Reinhold said.

"He did have at least two long guns," meaning rifles or shotguns, "and he did have one handgun that we're aware of," the agent said, but he declined to be more specific. Some of the weapons were bought legally, some may not have been, Reinhold said.

The gunman also was wearing a vest designed to hold extra ammunition, Reinhold said, but he did not have body armor.

Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas, the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, said he had been told that the gunman's main weapon was an AK-47-style assault rifle.

The shootings have led to calls nationwide for better security for those who work at military facilities like those attacked Thursday, including from several presidential candidates and from Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson. A similar shooting at a recruiting office in Little Rock in 2009 killed one Army private and injured another.

Except for those assigned to police and security work, or engaged in certain kinds of exercises, military personnel generally are not armed when at military facilities.

The Defense Department said Friday that the general security level had not been raised at military installations around the country in the wake of the shooting but that individual station commanders might take added precautions.

In May, the military command raised the terrorism precaution level at its domestic installations to "threat condition alpha," the lowest of four steps above normal, because of the general possibility of attacks inspired by the Islamic State extremist group, and it has remained there.

family violence

Born in Kuwait in 1990, Abdulazeez became a U.S. citizen in 2003 through the naturalization of his mother, federal officials said. Because he was a minor at the time, he did not have to apply separately for citizenship.

When his family came to live in the United States, both his mother and father were citizens of Jordan "of Palestinian descent," a law enforcement official said. His father is also a naturalized citizen.

Although counterterrorism officials had not been investigating Abdulazeez before Thursday's shooting, federal officials familiar with the inquiry said his father had been investigated years ago for giving money to an organization with possible ties to terrorists.

McCaul said the elder Abdulazeez had been put on a watch list preventing him from flying.

"I believe there was a preliminary investigation," McCaul said, "but there was no derogatory information, and he was taken off the list."

Father and son were able to travel together to Jordan in recent years, a law enforcement official said.

The elder Abdulazeez, who graduated in 1983 from Texas A&M University and works as a soil engineer for the city of Chattanooga, has a history of violence, according to court records.

In February 2009, the gunman's mother, Rasmia Ibrahim Abdulazeez, filed for divorce from his father. In court documents she said her husband repeatedly beat and assaulted her and their five children and threatened to take a second wife, "as permitted under certain circumstances under Islamic Law."

According to Hamilton County court records filed in Chattanooga, Rasmia Abdulazeez said at one point she was hurt "so severely that she fled the marital home and went to a crisis center."

She said in court documents that when she returned to their home he continued to beat her, in front of the children, and he also struck the children as well. Further, she said, he sexually assaulted her in front of the children.

Her brothers then flew from Kuwait and Washington, D.C., to visit the family in Chattanooga to attempt to calm things down. But when they left, she said, her husband became "more abusive," the court records said.

The husband was issued a summons to appear and defend himself, but he never did. Instead, three weeks later the couple signed an agreement to drop the matter and reconcile their differences, the documents said.

Officials have said the younger Abdulazeez had no criminal record, other than a drunken-driving charge in April.

Muhammad Abdulazeez got an engineering degree from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga in 2012 and for the past three months had been working at Superior Essex Inc., which designs and makes wire and cable products.

In college, he worked as an intern a few years ago at the Tennessee Valley Authority, the federally owned utility that operates power plants and dams across the South.

He also briefly worked at a nuclear plant near Cleveland in 2013 but was let go after failing a background check, FirstEnergy Corp. spokesman Todd Schneider said Friday. He was conditionally hired as an engineer at the Perry Nuclear Power Plant and spent 10 days there before he was let go, Schneider said.

The spokesman would not say why Abdulazeez didn't pass the screening process, saying only that "he did not meet minimum requirements for ongoing employment."

"He worked in an administrative building," Schneider said. "He was never allowed in the protected area of the plant near the reactor."

Information for this article was contributed by Richard Fausset, Richard Perez-Pena, Eric Schmitt, Al Baker, Julia Preston, Elizabeth Harris and Laurie Goodstein of The New York Times; by Michal Kunzelman, Kathleen Foody, John Seewer and staff members of The Associated Press; by Richard A. Serrano, Jenny Jarvie, Michael Muskal, Jenny Jarvie, Michael Muskal, Richard A. Serrano, Christine Mai-Duc, Carol J. Williams, Natalie Schachar, Ryan Parker and W.J. Hennigan of the Los Angeles Times; and by Nikki Wentling of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.