This archive report was first published on 22 June 2020.
Published on June 22, 2020, an internal Saudi government report revealed that Lieutenant Alshamrani's radical views began to form in 2015, after he started following hard-line religious figures.
At 14, in 2012, Lieutenant Alshamrani became active on Twitter, initially focusing on poetry and the Quran. However, his online presence took a darker turn when he began following radical clerics, including Abdulaziz al-Tarifi and Ibrahim al-Sakran, who were later jailed in 2016.
According to the report, Lieutenant Alshamrani's initial contacts with Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) operatives occurred in 2015. The exact nature of their relationship remains unclear, but it is known that AQAP had previously trained and directed the underwear bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a decade earlier.
American investigators only discovered Lieutenant Alshamrani's connections to AQAP months after the shooting, after the FBI bypassed security features on his iPhones to uncover the evidence.
