US lawmakers will examine possible shortcomings in law enforcement or intelligence in the case of a Tennessee shooting that killed five servicemen, a top Republican said on Sunday, adding that the case may be linked to ISIL.
Representative Mike McCaul, who heads the US House of Representatives homeland security committee, told ABC’s “This Week” program the case highlighted growing concern about Internet-based directives from ISIL leaders in Syria.
Senator Dianne Feinstein, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said the gunman appeared to be a “classic lone wolf,” but said it was difficult to know for sure given new encryption applications available to terrorists.
Feinstein said legal counsels at big Internet companies were unwilling to bar those apps and remove other explicit postings about bomb-making techniques unless mandated by law.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation is investigating Thursday’s attack as an act of terrorism, but said it was premature to speculate on the motive of the gunman, Mohammod Youssuf Abdulazeez (24), a Kuwaiti-born naturalised US citizen.
US authorities said Abdulazeez sprayed gunfire at a military recruiting centre in a strip mall in Chattanooga, then drove to a Naval Reserve Centre about 6 miles (10 km) away, where he killed four Marines before he himself was shot dead.
Three people were wounded, including a sailor who died on Saturday.
McCaul said the Chattanooga case was troubling for several reasons, including the fact that Abdulazeez’s father had been on a US watch list, but that case was later closed.
FBI officials were now examining the suspect’s computer, his cell phone and his travel to Jordan, McCaul said. “We’ll be looking at all those details. This is one (where) we’ll be conducting oversight and examining what happened.”
McCaul said the US government had counted 200,000 tweets a day from ISIL and had active investigations under way in all 50 states. But he said Internet calls aimed at activating people in the United States were “very hard to stop.”
“This is a very difficult counter-terrorism challenge in the United States,” McCaul said, urging increased efforts to hit the ISIL officials who were issuing the cyber commands.
He said the FBI had arrested individuals in 60 separate cases linked to ISIL over the past year, including an alleged plot scheduled for the US national holiday on July 4.
Representative Ed Royce, who heads the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said lawmakers were also looking at changing federal law to allow Marines and other troops to fire at attackers at US facilities, much as they now can overseas.
Defense Secretary Ash Carter on Friday approved immediate steps to beef up protection of military sites.
The Marine Corps closed all recruiting stations within 40 miles (65 km) of the incident in Chattanooga, and told recruiters not to wear military uniforms, Pentagon spokesman Mark Wright said.
A couple of dozen residents of Chattanooga on Sunday stopped by a makeshift shrine of American flags, flowers, balloons and handwritten notes set up at the Navy Operational Support Center and Marine Corps Reserve Center, one of the targets of Thursday’s attack.
“The men who died here knew that losing their lives in service was a possibility, but they probably didn’t think it would happen on home soil,” said Dan Woughter, 67, a former Air Force serviceman who now works at a local manufacturing company.
He said he blamed the attack on the ISIL, and wanted to see the United States step up its attacks on the militant group in Syria and Iraq.
“The enemies of United States are doing what they said they would: encouraging lone wolf attacks in the US,” Woughter said. “It is time for us to do more to dissuade them.”
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