Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik, who opened fire on a San Bernardino holiday party earlier this month, were buried Tuesday in a quiet, graveside funeral guarded by FBI agents. Many of those who attended mosque with the couple refused to attend, two mosque members said US-born Farook, 28, and his Pakistani-born wife Malik, 29, killed 14 people and injured 21, in what US officials have called a terrorist attack. They died later that day in a gun battle with police.
The funeral followed traditional Islamic rituals. At a Muslim cemetery hours away from San Bernardino, the bodies were cleansed according to Islamic rules, wrapped in white cloth and buried. The funeral attendee and another person familiar with the situation, both of whom asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation, said it took a week to find a graveyard willing to accept the bodies. They said the husband and wife were ultimately buried in a cemetery far from San Bernardino, after a closer facility refused to take the bodies because of fears the graves would be desecrated. Neither person would identify the cemetery where the couple was buried.