San Diego Mosque Investigators Recover 30 Guns, Anti-Islamic Manifesto and Two-Year Online Trail Linking Teenage Killers Who Met on Discord

Investigators in San Diego have recovered 30 firearms, a crossbow, tactical gear and a hate-filled manifesto from properties tied to the two teenage gunmen who killed three worshippers at the Islamic Center of San Diego on Monday morning, the FBI and San Diego Police Department said in a joint briefing on Tuesday. The 17- and 18-year-old attackers, who fatally shot themselves in a car parked a few blocks from the mosque as police closed in, met online and were "radicalized through a shared digital environment" before ever encountering each other in person, FBI Special Agent in Charge Stacey Moy said.

The three men killed inside the mosque, located in the Clairemont neighborhood and the largest in San Diego County, were identified Tuesday as Amin Abdullah, a 58-year-old longtime security guard and father of eight; Mansour Kaziha, a 64-year-old mosque administrator who had worked at the center for more than two decades; and Nader Awad, a 47-year-old engineer who lived directly across the street and was attending the morning prayer when the attack began. Surveillance footage shows Abdullah charging at the shooters in an attempt to draw fire away from the prayer hall — an act that police said likely prevented a far larger death toll.

Federal agents executed three search warrants on Tuesday — at the home of one of the suspects in El Cajon, at a storage unit in Lemon Grove and at a vehicle abandoned several blocks from the mosque. They recovered an AR-15 style rifle, a 9mm Glock pistol used in the attack, a 12-gauge shotgun, two homemade silencers, more than 4,000 rounds of ammunition, a tactical vest with steel plate inserts and a 64-page manifesto in PDF form found on a laptop. Investigators say the document expressed anti-Islamic, antisemitic and anti-LGBTQ views, cited the 2019 Christchurch attacker by name and was posted to two extremist forums roughly 90 minutes before the shooting began.

The attackers' digital trail stretched back at least 14 months, according to a senior law enforcement official briefed on the inquiry. The pair connected on a Discord server devoted to firearm modifications before migrating to a private channel where they shared images of weapons, discussed reconnaissance trips to mosques in San Diego and Riverside counties and traded anti-Muslim memes. The FBI is examining whether either suspect had contact with foreign extremist networks; so far, the official said, there is "no indication of direction or material support from overseas."

The attack triggered an immediate spike in security at mosques across Southern California. The Council on American-Islamic Relations said its San Diego chapter received more than 200 reports of harassment and threats in the 36 hours since the shooting, four times the volume of a typical week. President Trump, who was briefed Monday afternoon at the White House, called the killings "a horrific act of hatred against Americans at prayer" and ordered flags at federal buildings to half-staff through sunset Friday. A funeral procession for Abdullah, a Somali-American Marine Corps veteran, drew more than 3,000 mourners to the mosque on Tuesday afternoon.