The woman who, with her husband, shot dead 14 people in California last week attended one of the most high-profile religious teaching centres for women in Pakistan, a teacher at the Al-Huda institute told AFP Monday.
Tashfeen Malik, 29, studied at the Al-Huda Institute in Multan, which admits middle-class women and also has offices in the US, the UAE, India and the UK, the teacher at the teaching centre who gave her name only as Muqadas said.
“It was a two-year course, but she did not finish it,” the teacher Muqadas said. “She was a good girl. I don’t know why she left and what happened to her.”
The teacher did not say when Malik studied at the Al-Huda institute, but fellow classmates at the Bahauddin Zakariya University said she had attended the institute after classes at the university, which she attended from 2007-2013.
Farhat Hashmi’s organisation, Al-Huda institute, has no known extremist links, though it has come under fire in the past from critics who say its ideology is extremist in nature.
Malik and her husband Syed Farook, 28, went on a killing spree at a social services centre in San Bernardino. Investigators suspect that Malik, who went to the United States (US) on a fiancee’s visa and spent extended periods of time in both Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, may have radicalised her husband.
The probe is trying to establish if she had contact with radicals in either country.
An administration official at the academy in Multan said he could neither confirm nor deny that Malik had studied there, and said he would discuss the issue with management.
“But we have nothing to do with it (the shooting) and are not responsible for our students’ personal acts,” he added.
One of Malik’s former classmates at the Bahauddin Zakariya University in Multan, where she studied pharmacology, told AFP she had attended the institute after classes, saying she “drastically changed” during her time there.
“Gradually she became more serious and strict,” said the student, requesting anonymity.
A second university student who also requested anonymity confirmed the account.
Pakistan has pledged to crack down on religious seminaries suspected of being breeding grounds for intolerance or even fostering extremism, with the country’s information minister Pervez Rashid terming them “universities of illiteracy and ignorance”. However the government’s efforts to rein in madrassas have prompted anger from many clerics.
