California shooter attended Islamic school in Pakistan

Published 10:13 am Monday, December 7, 2015

MULTAN, Pakistan — The woman who carried out last week’s mass shooting in California with her husband had attended an Islamic religious school, or madrassa, while living in Pakistan, intelligence officials and the school said Monday.

Few details have emerged about Tashfeen Malik’s life in Pakistan, where she lived from 2007 to 2014 before heading to the United States on a fiancee visa. Malik studied pharmacy at the Bahauddin Zakariya University in the central city of Multan, where she got a degree in 2013.

While in Multan, she also attended a religious school, which Pakistani intelligence officials on Monday identified as the Al-Huda International Seminary. The school is a women-only madrassa with branches across Pakistan and in the U.S. and Canada, said the officials, speaking on condition of anonymity in line with regulations.

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Al-Huda’s founder, Farhat Hashmi, who now lives in Canada, has been criticized for promoting a conservative strain of Islam, though the school has no known links to extremists. In Pakistan, it is popular among upper-middle class and urban women interested in Islamic studies.