San Bernardino victims remembered in California

The US state of California marks the first-year anniversary of San Bernardino shooting massacre, which claimed the lives of more than a dozen people.

Officials, emergency responders and residents on Friday attended the ceremony, observing a moment of silence for the victims of the 2015 shooting attack. Police officers in the city also held a symbolic 14-mile (23 kilometers) bike ride, the number which represents San Bernardino's death toll.

The carnage was carried out by a married couple in San Bernardino, southern California, on December 2 last year, marking one of the deadliest acts of terror in the United States since the September 11, 2001 attacks.

Tashfeen Malik, 27, and her husband Syed Rizwan Farook, 28, stormed a holiday party in San Bernardino, killing at least 14 people and injuring 21 others. Hours later, the couple died in a fire exchange with police.

The Daesh Takfiri terrorist group claimed responsibility for the mass killing, declaring the couple as its followers.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) also confirmed that the couple had been radicalized "for some time."

US police officials said at the time that Farook and his wife had enough bullets and bombs to kill hundreds when they launched their deadly attack, suggesting the bloodbath could have been far worse.

Describing the California shooting as an "act of terrorism”, US President Barack Obama said the couple who launched the attack "had gone down the dark path of radicalization."

"They had stockpiled assault weapons, ammunition and pipe bombs. So this was an act of terrorism," he claimed.

According to reports, Daesh Takfiri terrorists were first trained by the CIA in Jordan in 2012, and are now fighting a proxy war on behalf of Washington to overthrow the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. The militants have been committing heinous crimes against all ethnic and religious communities in Syria and Iraq over the past years.

The mass shooting in San Bernardino came three years after another deadly attack, in which a gunman killed 20 children and six adults at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in December 2012.

There have been more than 350 mass shootings so far this year in the United States, in which four or more people were wounded or killed, according to the crowd-sourced website shootingtracker.com, which keeps a running tally of US gun violence.

Obama has time and again said the “biggest frustration” of his time in the office has been the inability to reduce unparalleled levels of gun violence in the country.

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