Los Angeles: Hacking the iPhone of a Pakistani-American shooter involved in the San Bernardino terror attack has given the FBI new data to help them answer some of the unresolved questions in the ongoing probe, US law enforcement officials say.
Breaking into the iPhone of Syed Farook has produced data the FBI did not have before and has helped the investigators answer some remaining questions, CNN reported, quoting US law enforcement officials as saying.
Investigators are now more confident that Farook and his Pakistani wife Tashfeen Malik did not make contact with another plotter during an 18-minute gap that the FBI said was missing from their time line of the attackers' whereabouts after the mass shooting, the officials said.
The phone has helped investigators address lingering concern that the two may have help, perhaps from friends and family, the officials said.
The phone did not contain evidence of contacts with other ISIS supporters or the use of encrypted communications during the period the FBI was concerned about. The FBI views that information as valuable to the probe, possibilities it could not discount without getting into the phone, the officials said.
Law enforcement officials said this month that they had finally cracked the iPhone 5c used by Farooq, one of two shooters in the December 2015 attack that left 14 people dead in California. The iPhone was at the center of a legal dispute between the US government and Apple.
FBI Director James Comey had said the US government purchased "a tool" from a private party to unlock the iPhone used by Farooq.
Apple was fighting a judge's order to help the FBI get past security features to get access to the phone's data.
One of the points of contention during the legal fight was Apple's argument that the FBI already had obtained relevant data from the iCloud account linked to the phone and from other data not stored on the device, that breaking into the device would be of little use, the report said.
The government contended investigators could not be sure until they accessed data from the phone.
FBI investigators now have concluded there was data on the phone they did not have previously, law enforcement officials said, declining to offer more specifics.
The data is still being analysed and more leads are being followed, the officials said.
Much of the mystery of the missing 18 minutes, and why the terrorists drove seemingly aimlessly around the San Bernardino area following the attack, remains unsolved, the report said.
Farook and his wife Tashfeen died in a firefight with police after the December 2 terror attack on a a centre for the disabled.
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