By Sadie Gurman and Dustin Volz 

A Saudi aviation student who killed three people on a Florida Navy base last year had extensive ties to al Qaeda, details that investigators were able to learn by accessing the gunman's iPhones after months of delays, top U.S. law-enforcement officials said Monday, accusing Apple Inc. of providing virtually no help in the investigation.

The gunman, Second Lt. Mohammed Alshamrani, had been communicating with a number of operatives of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula for years, even before he began training with the U.S. military, officials said, a discovery that was made based on information recovered from his two locked iPhones.

Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula has long been seen as one of the terrorist group's most active and dangerous affiliates.

"We received effectively no help from Apple" to access the phones, Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Chistopher Wray said, delaying the probe and potentially jeopardizing public safety.

The FBI, bypassing Apple's security features, was ultimately able to access information on both phones belonging to the gunman, but there is no guarantee that law enforcement could do that in a future case, Attorney General William Barr said.

The remarks were the government's strongest yet against Apple's stance on encryption, and escalated pressure on the company to provide law enforcement access to its technology and on Congress to consider legislation that could mandate technology companies to do so.

"The truth is that we needed some luck here in addition to the ingenuity to get into the phones this time," Mr. Barr said. "There's no guarantee that we can be successful in the future or avoid massive delays, in this case, for months."

Apple didn't immediately respond to a request for comment, but has previously said that it cooperated extensively and immediately with the FBI to obtain available information about Alshamrani after the December attack, including iCloud backup data and account and transactional information.

The company and other major Silicon Valley firms, including Facebook, have said for years that undermining their security protocols would make all of their users vulnerable to malicious cyber activity, a view shared by most independent experts.

Messrs. Barr and Wray didn't provide precise specifics about how they were unable to unlock the phones.

Alshamrani posted anti-U.S. messages on social media about two hours before he opened fire in a classroom at Naval Air Station Pensacola on Dec. 6, killing three and wounding eight more before he was fatally shot, officials have said.

"The evidence we've been able to develop from the killer's devices shows that the Pensacola attack was actually the brutal culmination of years of planning and preparation by a long time [al Qaeda] associate," Mr. Wray said, noting that his radicalization dated back to as early 2015.

The gunman described a desire to learn about flying years ago, about the same time he talked about attending the Saudi Air Force Academy in order to carry out what he described as a "special operation," Mr. Wray said.

Alshamrani wrote a final will purporting to explain himself and saved it in his phone, Mr. Wray said. Al Qaeda released the will two months later, claiming responsibility for the attack.

Investigators secured a court order for information from the gunman's devices within a day of the shooting but remained unable to get into his encrypted phones.

"The delay from getting into these devices didn't just divert our personnel from other important work, it also seriously hampered this investigation," Mr. Wray said Monday. "Finally getting our hands on the evidence [the gunman] tried to keep from us, is great, but we really needed it months ago back in December, when the court issued its warrants."

Write to Sadie Gurman at sadie.gurman@wsj.com and Dustin Volz at dustin.volz@wsj.com

 

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

May 18, 2020 13:00 ET (17:00 GMT)

Copyright (c) 2020 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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