Two blasts at Boston marathon kill three and injure more than 100

[MrBlueSky]

Boston bomb suspect's name was on classified government watch lists

From REUTERS
Last Updated: 5:50 PM, April 24, 2013
Posted: 5:45 PM, April 24, 2013

The name of one of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, was listed on the U.S. government's highly classified central database of people it views as potential terrorists. But the list is so vast that this did not mean authorities automatically kept close tabs on him, sources close to the bombing investigation said on Tuesday.

Tsarnaev, 26, was killed in a police shootout early Friday, while his younger brother Dzhokhar, 19, was captured later that day. Prosecutors say the brothers, ethnic Chechens who had been living in the United States for more than a decade, planted two bombs that exploded near the finish line of the marathon on April 15, killing three people and wounding more than 200.

This Monday, April 15, 2013 photo provided by Bob Leonard shows second from left, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who was dubbed Suspect No. 1 and third from left, Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev, who was dubbed Suspect No. 2 in the Boston Marathon bombings.

The sources said Tamerlan Tsarnaev's details were entered into TIDE, a database maintained by the National Counterterrorism Center, because the FBI spoke to him in 2011 while investigating a Russian tip-off that he had become a follower of radical Islamists.

The FBI found nothing to suggest he was an active threat, but all the same placed his name on the "Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment" list. The FBI has not said what it did find about Tsarnaev.

But the database, which holds more than half a million names, is only a repository of information on people who U.S. authorities see as known, suspected or potential terrorists from around the world.

Because of its huge size, U.S. investigators do not routinely monitor everyone registered there, said U.S. officials familiar with the database.

As of 2008, TIDE contained more than 540,000 names, although they represented about 450,000 actual people, because some of the entries are aliases or different name spellings for the same person. Fewer than 5 percent of the TIDE entries were U.S. citizens or legal residents, according to a description of the database on the NCTC website.

The TIDE database is one of many federal security databases set up after the September 11, 2001, attacks. The database system has been criticized in the past for being too cumbersome, especially in light of an attempted attack on a plane in 2009. Intelligence and security agencies acknowledged in Congress that they had missed clues to the Detroit "underpants bomber" Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. Officials said after the incident that he had been listed in the TIDE database.

Republican Senator Susan Collins said there were problems in sharing information ahead of the Boston bombings, too.

"This is troubling to me that this many years after the attacks on our country in 2001 that we still seem to have stovepipes that prevent information from being shared effectively," she said. Collins was speaking after the FBI gave a closed-door briefing to the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday, but she did not elaborate.

 

[MrBlueSky]

Dead bomber, family on welfare before Boston Marathon blast: report

By DAVID K. LI
Last Updated: 4:01 PM, April 24, 2013
Posted: 10:40 AM, April 24, 2013

Boston Bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev's mother-in-law Judith Russell plays with granddaughter Zahara Tsarnaev, 3, in her backyard today.

He’s the ultimate ingrate.

US-hating terrorist Tamerlan Tsarnaev took government handouts even as he delved deep into the world of violent, radical Islam, officials said.

Tsarnaev, his wife Katherine Russell and their 3-year-old daughter were on the state dole as recently as 2012, officials with the state’s Office of Health and Human Services told the Boston Herald.

The dead Boston Marathon bomber and his family stopped receiving benefits because his hard-working wife, toiling for up 80 hours a week, brought home enough bread to make them ineligible for government assistance.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, left, and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19.

Katherine Russell, wife of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, leaves her house earlier this week.

The home health-care aide supported her deadbeat husband, who stayed at home with the child.

Tsarnaev’s younger brother, bombing suspect Dzhokar, and their parents also received benefits when they were younger.

Relatives have said Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s journey to violent hate began around 2008 or 2009.

Tamerlan was killed last week, hours after cops released pictures of the suspected brother bombers.

Cops shot Tamerlan but were still going to take him alive when fleeing Dzhokar accidentally ran over his big brother early Friday morning.

Despite their low-income lives, the brothers allegedly collected just enough green to fashion bombs that probably cost less than $100 apiece to construct.

The crude bombs allegedly fashioned by the Tsarnaev brothers were made of affordable kitchen pressure cookers, filled with BBs and other small pieces of metal.

“There is no barrier here to two men doing this on their own,” Brian Michael Jenkins, a Rand Corp. adviser and terrorism expert, told the Boston Globe.

“You could easily do this for under $100 per bomb. . . . This is an investment even someone with modest means can make.”

A lawyer for Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s wife said his client was the hard-working bread winner of the family.

“She has been living in Cambridge, raising her child, and working long hours, caring for people in their homes who are unable to care for themselves,’’ said Amato DeLuca, representing Katherine Russell.

Dzhokhar was clearly on a better path than his big brothers Tamerlan, having won scholarship money for his education at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.

He still struggled for pocket money, and resorted to selling marijuana to classmates, several students told the Globe.

And what he wasn’t selling, Dzhokhar was smoking.

“There was a permanent stench of marijuana in his room,” said one observer.

Local mechanic Gilberto Junior recalled Dzhokhar bringing friends to his garage to fix their cars. Junior said Dzhokhar was determined to buy a new car after graduating from college.

Meanwhile, US investigators are in contact with the parents of the two suspects in southern Russia and working with Russian security officials to shed light on the deadly attack, a US Embassy official said Wednesday.

The Americans traveled Tuesday from Moscow to the predominantly Muslim province of Dagestan "because the investigation is ongoing, it's not over," said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media. He said the US team is working with the Russian security services, the FSB.

"This is a horrible tragedy for our country, but one positive development might be closer cooperation on this set of issues with the Russian government," the embassy official said.

On Wednesday, their mother, Zubeidat Tsarnaeva, was inside the FSB building in Makhachkala, the capital of Dagestan, where she was believed to be speaking further to US and Russian investigators.

Heda Saratova, a prominent Chechen rights activist providing support to the distraught mother, said Tsarnaeva first went in for questioning on Tuesday, returning late at night. Saratova said she had no details about the discussions, but Tsarnaeva said they were "cordial."

The father, Anzor Tsarnaev, also was summoned to the FSB headquarters but did not go because he felt ill.

With AP

 

[THE_CHANSTER]

The clip is self explanatory. The mother is clearly delusional.

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/9TZ7WnC4IK0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

 

[MortalKombat]

Mayor Bloomberg: New York City was Boston bombers' next target

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev told New York City police that he and his older brother had decided spontaneously last week to drive to New York and launch an attack.

By The Associated Press | Apr.26, 2013 | 9:16 AM |

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The Boston Marathon bombers were headed for New York's Times Square to blow up the rest of their explosives, authorities said, in what they portrayed as a chilling, spur-of-the-moment scheme that fell apart when the brothers realized the car they had hijacked was low on gas.

New York City Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said Dzhokhar Tsarnaev told interrogators from his hospital bed that he and his older brother had decided spontaneously last week to drive to New York and launch an attack. In their stolen sport utility vehicle they had five pipe bombs and a pressure-cooker explosive like the ones that blew up at the marathon, Kelly said.

"New York City was next on their list of targets," Mayor Michael Bloomberg said.

The plan fell apart when the Tsarnaev brothers got into a shootout just outside Boston that left Tamerlan Tsarnaev dead, Kelly said.

"We don't know if we would have been able to stop the terrorists had they arrived here from Boston," New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said. "We're just thankful that we didn't have to find out that answer."

Dzhokhar, 19, is charged with carrying out the Boston Marathon bombing that killed three people and wounded more than 260, and he could get the death penalty.

Christina DiIorio-Sterling, a spokeswoman for U.S.*Attorney Carmen Ortiz in Boston, would not comment on whether authorities plan to add charges based on alleged plan to attack New York.

The Middlesex County district attorney's office also is building a murder case against the surviving Tsarnaev for the death of Massachusetts Institute of Technology police officer Sean Collier three days after the bombings, office spokeswoman Stephanie Guyotte said.

Investigators and lawmakers briefed by the FBI have said that the Tsarnaev brothers … ethnic Chechens from Russia who had lived in the U.S.* for about a decade … were motivated by anger over the U.S.* wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Based on the younger man's interrogation and other evidence, authorities have said it appears so far that the Muslim brothers were radicalized via jihadi material on the Internet instead of by any direct contact with terrorist organizations, but they have said it is still an open question.

Dzhokhar was interrogated in his hospital room over a period of 16 hours without being read his constitutional rights. He immediately stopped talking after a magistrate judge and a representative from the U.S.* Attorney's office entered the room and advised him of his rights to keep quiet and seek a lawyer, according to a U.S.* law enforcement official and others briefed on the interrogation.

Tamerlan had come under scrutiny from the FBI, the CIA and Russian intelligence well before the Boston attack. The CIA had added Tamerlan's name to a terrorist database 18 months ago, after Russian intelligence flagged him as a possible Muslim radical, said officials close to the investigation who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the case publicly.

That disclosure is certain to raise questions in Congress over whether the Obama administration missed an opportunity to thwart the Boston attack.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev told authorities that his older brother only recently recruited him to be part of the attack, two U.S.* officials said Wednesday.

Kelly, citing interrogations carried out by the task force investigating the Boston Marathon attack, said that days after the bombing, the Tsarnaev brothers "planned to travel to Manhattan to detonate their remaining explosives in Times Square."

"They discussed this while driving around in a Mercedes SUV that they hijacked after they shot and killed the officer at MIT," the police commissioner said. "That plan, however, fell apart when they realized that the vehicle they hijacked was low on gas and ordered the driver to stop at a nearby gas station."

The driver escaped and called police, Kelly said. That set off the gun battle and manhunt that ended a day later with Dzhokhar captured and 26-year-old Tamerlan dead.

A day earlier, Kelly said that Tsarnaev had talked about coming to New York "to party" after the attack and that there wasn't evidence of a plot against the city. But Kelly said a later interview with the suspect turned up the information.

"He was a lot more lucid and gave more detail in the second interrogation," Kelly said. He and the mayor were briefed on the information Wednesday night by the Joint Terrorism Task Force.

Kelly said there was no evidence New York was still a target. But in a show of force, police cruisers with blinking red lights were lined up in the middle of Times Square on Thursday afternoon, and uniformed officers stood shoulder to shoulder.

"Why are they standing like that? This is supposed to make me feel safer?" asked Elisabeth Bennecib, a tourist and legal consultant from Toulouse, France.

"It makes me feel more anxious, like something bad is about to happen."

Above the square, an electronic news ticker announced that the Boston Marathon suspects' next target might have been Times Square.

In 2010, Times Square was targeted with a car bomb that never went off. Pakistani immigrant Faisal Shahzad had planted a bomb in a sport utility vehicle, but street vendors noticed smoke and it was disabled. Shahzad was arrested as he tried to leave the country and was sentenced to life in prison.

Meanwhile, the Tsarnaev brothers' father said Thursday that he is leaving Russia for the U.S.*in the next day or two, but their mother said she was still thinking it over.

Anzor Tsarnaev has expressed a desire to go to the U.S.*to find out what happened with his sons, defend his hospitalized son and, if possible, bring his older son's body back to Russia for burial.

Their mother, Zubeidat Tsarnaeva, who was charged with shoplifting in the U.S. *last summer, said she has been assured by lawyers that she would not be arrested, but was still deciding whether to go.

 

[Motaro]

Boston bombing suspect moved to prison from hospital: officials

By Scott Malone
BOSTON | Fri Apr 26, 2013 7:25am EDT

(Reuters) - Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has been moved to a prison at Fort Devens, Massachusetts, from the hospital where he had been held since his arrest a week ago, the U.S. Marshals Service said on Friday.

The 19-year-old ethnic Chechen, who was badly wounded in an overnight shootout last week with police hours after authorities released pictures of him and his older brother, also a suspect, had previously been held at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, where some of the victims were also being treated.

Tsarnaev's older brother, 26-year-old Tamerlan, died in the shootout.

Tsarnaev was charged on Monday with the April 15 bombing, which killed three and wounded 264 at the finish line of the Boston Marathon. If convicted, he faces the possibility of the death penalty.

"The U.S. Marshals Service confirms that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has been transported from the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and is now confined at the Bureau of Prisons facility FMC Devens at Ft. Devens, Mass.," said U.S. Marshals Service spokesman Drew Wade.

Devens, Massachusetts, is about 39 miles west of Boston. The prison there specializes in inmates who need long-term medical or mental health there, according to the Bureau of Prisons website. It currently holds about 1,000 prisoners.

NIGHT OF TERROR

Authorities say the brothers set off a pair of homemade bombs at the marathon on April 15. Three days later, the FBI and police identified the men in photos and videos taken at the scene.

The brothers are also suspected of shooting Massachusetts Institute of Technology police officer Sean Collier, 26, on April 18 and then hijacking a man in a car, which they planned to drive to New York City and set off additional explosives in Times Square.

Their plan was foiled when the car, a Mercedes sport-utility vehicle, ran low on fuel and they stopped for gas, giving the man a chance to escape.

Their carjacking victim was a 26-year-old man of Chinese origin who goes by the American nickname "Danny," the Boston Globe reported on Friday. The newspaper did not publish his Chinese name at his request.

"I don't want to die," the man recalled thinking as the brothers drove him around for some 90 minutes, making banal small talk, according to an interview with the Globe. "I have a lot of dreams that haven't come true yet."

Danny, who is trained as an engineer, kept the brothers calm by playing up his outsider status, although at first they were puzzled by his Chinese accent, the Globe said. After determining that the victim was Chinese, Tamerlan Tsarnaev identified himself as a Muslim, the newspaper reported.

"Chinese are very friendly to Muslims!" Danny said, according to the interview. "We are so friendly to Muslims."

One of the three people who died in the bombing was also Chinese, 23-year-old graduate student Lingzi Lu. An 8-year-old boy, Martin Richard, and 29-year-old restaurant manager Krystle Campbell were also killed in the attack.

The brothers' parents, father Anzor Tsarnaev and mother Zubeidat Tsarnaeva, told reporters on Thursday in Makhachkala, the capital of Russia's Dagestan region, that they believed their son was innocent.

The father said he planned to travel to Boston to bury Tamerlan.

This week, lawmakers demanded answers about what the U.S. government knew about the suspects before the bombing. In 2011, Russia had asked the FBI to question Tamerlan because of concerns that he may have been a radical Islamist.

(Reporting by Scott Malone; Editing by Lisa Von Ahn)

 

[MrBlueSky]

Boston bombing victim vows to dance again

BRIDGET MURPHY, Associated Press Updated April 26, 2013, 7:16 pm

The surviving suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings has told police he and his brother were on their way to New York to attack Times Square.

Mornings are the hardest for Adrianne Haslet because the 32-year-old professional ballroom dancer forgets at first that her left foot is gone.

Beth Roche wakes up knowing she can't feel sorry for herself, that she has to focus on rehabbing her ravaged left leg.

But despite life-changing injuries, both women have vowed that the Boston Marathon bombings that killed three people and left them among the ranks of more than 260 injured will not define their lives.

Parts of them may be broken, but both patients at Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital said that their spirits are intact and their thoughts are positive.

"I absolutely want to dance again and I also want to run the marathon next year," said Haslet. "I will crawl across the finish line, literally crawl, if it means I finish it."

Adrianne Haslet, a a professional ballroom dancer injured by one of the bombs that exploded near the Boston Marathon finish line, lifts her bandaged left leg in her bed at Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital in Boston. Photo: APalt=Adrianne Haslet

Roche, a 59-year-old medical office manager from Highland, Ind., who ran Chicago's marathon last year, said she's concentrating on more than just walking again.

"I want to do another marathon by the time I'm 65," she said Wednesday.

Roche said the first bomb at the marathon peeled her leg open "like a sardine can." It happened right after she saw her daughter, Rebecca Roche, a 33-year-old Boston pharmacist, cross the race's finish line.

The mother has had one surgery in which doctors implanted pins and plates in her leg, and has another surgery in her future.

The first blast left bones poking out of her leg, and made her unable to run for cover. She said a first responder tried to shield her as the second bomb exploded.

Roche ended up at Tufts Medical Center, and begged staffers before she went into surgery to find her family and let them know she was alive.

The blast from the second explosion knocked Haslet off her feet from about four feet away.

The Boston woman, an Arthur Murray Dance Studio employee, thought she was going to die when she looked down and saw how her body had been mutilated.

She's had one surgery to amputate her left foot, and another in which doctors amputated more of the same leg below her knee.

In the hours before terror struck Boylston Street, Haslet was basking in the joy of having her husband home again. Two weeks earlier, the Air Force captain had returned from a four-month deployment in Afghanistan.

On Patriots' Day afternoon, they were walking near the marathon's finish line when the second explosion left them tangled in a heap on the ground and Haslet saw something was wrong with her foot.

"I remember thinking, 'That's so gross,' and being terrified that this is the moment I was going to die," she said.

Haslet crawled toward a restaurant door, before someone dragged her toward a staircase. Her husband, although also injured, took off his belt to make a tourniquet for her. Then others arrived to help and soon she was in a triage area where someone wrote a number on her forehead.

"I just prayed that I had a number that was high enough to get help," she said. "I just kept screaming out, 'I'm a ballroom dancer! I'm a ballroom dancer! Just save my foot."

The next day, she woke up at Boston Medical Center and saw her mother.

"I told my mom 'My foot feels like it's asleep.' And she said, 'Adrianne, you don't have a foot anymore.'"

Beth Roche, right, whose left leg was severely injured by one of the bombs that exploded near the Boston Marathon finish line, sits on her bed with her daughter Rebecca Roche. Photo: APalt=Beth Roche

Over a week after the attack, neither Haslet nor Roche has thought much about the Russian-born brothers, one dead, one alive, whom authorities said are responsible for the attack.

As she recovers, Haslet said she trusts law-enforcement officials will do what's best.

She's hoping to get a prosthetic device in the next two months.

Roche cannot bend her left leg, as a grid of metal rods that's meant to help her heal protrudes into it.

She said she isn't sure if authorities should seek the death penalty for the remaining bombing suspect, but says everyone should move forward without fear.

"If we're afraid, the enemy wins," she said.

 

[MrBlueSky]

Bomber had a Jihadi Mommy

Caught on wiretap

By BILL SANDERSON
From POST WIRES
Last Updated: 3:50 AM, April 28, 2013
Posted: 2:10 AM, April 28, 2013

Jihad was handed down from mother to son in the Tsarnaev family, newly disclosed wiretaps show.

Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev talked over Muslim extremist ideas with his mother, Zubeidat, in a conversation recorded by the FSB, the Russian internal security service.

In the early 2011 conversation, Tamerlan and his mother vaguely discussed jihad, American officials told the AP.

During their chat, Zubeidat discussed with her son the possibility he could go to Palestine, according to information about the conversation the Russians didn’t share with the US until after the Boston bombings.

LIKE MOTHER, LIKE SON: Zubeidat Tsarnaeva (above) was heard on Russian wiretaps discussing radical Islamic ideas with her son, Tamerlan.

Tamerlan was cool to the Palestine idea, because he didn’t speak the language, the officials said.

Soon after the mother-son jihad chat, the Russians asked the FBI to bring Tamerlan in for an interview, because they feared he had taken on religious extremist views.

US officials said the information the Russians shared then was vague. Nothing came of the questioning, and the FBI closed the case in June 2011.

There’s other evidence that Zubeidat swayed her son’s religious views.

Ruslan Tsarni, an uncle of the Tsarnaev brothers and Zubeidat’s former brother-in-law, said yesterday that Zubeidat was a “big-time influence” as her older son increasingly embraced his Muslim faith and decided to quit boxing and school.

Zubeidat Tsarnaev moved from Dagestan to Cambridge, Mass., with her husband and sons in 2002. Several accounts say over the years, she gradually became more religious.

FSB agents recorded her in 2011 in a second phone conversation, with someone under FBI investigation in an unrelated case. Officials did not disclose details of that call.

Others also had sway over Tamerlan’s radical thinking — includnig Gadzhimurad Dolgatov, an Islamist leader blamed for dozens of attacks and bombings in Dagestan.

Dolgatov, who was slain by Russian security forces in December, went by the nom de guerre of Abu Duana. He led a cell of the Caucasus Emirate, Russia’s most feared Islamist group, and was allied with other separatist groups in the region.

In an online video, Dolgatov gives a rambling speech in front of a banner while wearing military fatigues and holding an automatic rifle.

“I’m warning you, I’ll kill you just like I’ll kill them [police officers]. Don’t become their pawns,” he declared. “If you have brains, you won’t want to die leaving behind widows, orphans and crying mothers. We’ll destroy you. If you side with the police, you are helping Satan. I’m warning you.”

Tamerlan visited Dagestan for six months in 2012, and posted links to Dolgatov’s videos when he returned.

“Dolgatov was an obscure figure with local significance for a short period of time — the time Tamerlan was in Dagestan,” a US official told the Sunday Times of London. “The fact that Tamerlan viewed his videos online appears to be significant. It just seems too much of a coincidence.”

Russian investigators agreed. “It’s odd that Tsarnaev should post Dolgatov’s video. How come he was even aware of his existence?” a Russian Interior Ministry official told the newspaper.

“We’re looking into whether the two men met or had any contact.”

Tamerlan is believed to have enlisted his brother, Dzhokhar, 19, for the Boston Marathon attack, which killed three and injured 260.

Probers believe the brothers were trained in how to build the remotely triggered Boston bombs.

But Dzhokhar claimed he and Tamerlan built the bombs with instructions they found online.

Tamerlan, 26, was shot in a police shootout. Dzhokhar was badly injured trying to flee, and is in a prison hospital.

 

[Motaro]

Boston's police chief says he is 'fine' with calls for suspect to be executed

Boston's police chief has said that he backs the death penalty for the younger of the two Chechen brothers who allegedly bombed the city's marathon race.

Photo: AP

By Colin Freeman
10:30AM BST 27 Apr 2013

Speaking to BBC Radio Four's Today programme on Saturday, police commissioner Ed Davis gave a blunt answer when asked about calls for 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to be executed.

"That's fine with me," he replied.

Tsarnaev is in custody and has been charged over the April 15 attacks. His older brother Tamerlan, 26, was killed during a shoot-out with police days after the bombings.

In a wide-ranging interview, Mr Davis also said that the attacks, which killed three people including an eight-year-old boy, could lead to Americans losing their long-standing civil liberties objections to CCTV monitoring in public places. The country still has a relatively small CCTV network compared to Britain, but Mr Davis predicted that their role in helping identify the bombers quickly would lead to them becoming much more widespread.

"I think the government will probably install more cameras across the nation as a result of this," said Mr Davis. "Governments should realise that not only do cameras assist in the prosecution of a case and the discovery of suspects, but they also perform a target-hardening role that will be helpful. I think that more cameras will deter people from these acts."

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the younger Boston bomber. Picture AP

He added that he had been schooled in their importance as a crime-fighting tool by the former Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Ian Blair, who had shown him how they had been used after the 2005 bombings in London.

"Within ten minutes of establishing a command post I had ordered video from the various establishments and city cameras in that area," Mr Davis said. He added: "That played an important in the timely identification of these individuals."

Asked about what drove the Tsarnaev brothers to commit such acts of violence, Mr Davis drew comparisons with Boston's inner-city gangs, who he described as similarly "disaffected" young men drawn into violence. But he stressed that no attempts to understand the bombers' backgrounds and motivations could excuse what they had done.

"I think it is very important that society does as much outreach for people who are marginalised as possible. But that don't mistake that observation for sympathy. I watched this young man put a satchel on the ground that blew up and killed an eight-year-old boy, and a young woman standing next to him. I have no sympathy for him whatsoever."

 

[MrBlueSky]

Mother of bomb suspects found deeper spirituality

By DAVID CARUSO, MICHAEL KUNZELMAN and MAX SEDDON | Associated Press – 9 hrs ago

Associated Press/Patimat Suleimanova - In this image taken from a video, an undated family photo provided by Patimat Suleimanova, the aunt of USA Boston bomb suspects, shows Anzor Tsarnaev left, Zubeidat Tsarnaev holding Tamerlan Tsarnaev and Anzor's brother Mukhammad Tsarnaev. Now known as the angry and grieving mother of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects, Zubeidat Tsarnaev is drawing increased attention after federal officials say Russian authorities intercepted her phone calls, including one in which she vaguely discussed jihad with her elder son. In another, she was recorded talking to someone in southern Russia who is under FBI investigation in an unrelated case, U.S. officials said. (AP Photo/Patimat Suleimanova)

BOSTON (AP) — In photos of her as a younger woman, Zubeidat Tsarnaeva wears a low-cut blouse and has her hair teased like a 1980s rock star. After she arrived in the U.S. from Russia in 2002, she went to beauty school and did facials at a suburban day spa.

But in recent years, people noticed a change. She began wearing a hijab and cited conspiracy theories about 9/11 being a plot against Muslims. Now known as the angry and grieving mother of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects, Tsarnaeva is drawing increased attention after federal officials say Russian authorities intercepted her phone calls, including one in which she vaguely discussed jihad with her elder son. In another, she was recorded talking to someone in southern Russia who is under FBI investigation in an unrelated case, U.S. officials said.

Tsarnaeva insists there is no mystery. She's no terrorist, just someone who found a deeper spirituality. She insists her sons — Tamerlan, who was killed in a gunfight with police, and Dzhokhar, who was wounded and captured — are innocent. "It's all lies and hypocrisy," she told The Associated Press in Dagestan. "I'm sick and tired of all this nonsense that they make up about me and my children. People know me as a regular person, and I've never been mixed up in any criminal intentions, especially any linked to terrorism."

Amid the scrutiny, Tsarnaeva and her ex-husband, Anzor Tsarnaev, say they have put off the idea of any trip to the U.S. to reclaim their elder son's body or try to visit Dzhokhar in jail. Tsarnaev told the AP on Sunday he was too ill to travel to the U.S. Tsarnaeva faces a 2012 shoplifting charge in a Boston suburb, though it was unclear whether that was a deterrent.

At a news conference in Dagestan with Anzor last week, Tsarnaeva appeared overwhelmed with grief one moment, defiant the next. "They already are talking about that we are terrorists, I am terrorist," she said. "They already want me, him and all of us to look (like) terrorists." Tsarnaeva arrived in the U.S. in 2002, settling in a working-class section of Cambridge, Mass. With four children, Anzor and Zubeidat qualified for food stamps and were on and off public assistance benefits for years. The large family squeezed itself into a third-floor apartment.

Zubeidat took classes at the Catherine Hinds Institute of Esthetics, before becoming a state-licensed aesthetician. Anzor, who had studied law, fixed cars.
By some accounts, the family was tolerant. Bethany Smith, a New Yorker who befriended Zubeidat's two daughters, said in an interview with Newsday that when she stayed with the family for a month in 2008 while she looked at colleges, she was welcomed even though she was Christian and had tattoos.

"I had nothing but love over there. They accepted me for who I was," Smith told the newspaper. "Their mother, Zubeidat, she considered me to be a part of the family. She called me her third daughter." Zubeidat said she and Tamerlan began to turn more deeply into their Muslim faith about five years ago after being influenced by a family friend, named "Misha." The man, whose full name she didn't reveal, impressed her with a religious devotion that was far greater than her own, even though he was an ethnic Armenian who converted to Islam.

"I wasn't praying until he prayed in our house, so I just got really ashamed that I am not praying, being a Muslim, being born Muslim. I am not praying. Misha, who converted, was praying," she said. By then, she had left her job at the day spa and was giving facials in her apartment. One client, Alyssa Kilzer, noticed the change when Tsarnaeva put on a head scarf before leaving the apartment.

"She had never worn a hijab while working at the spa previously, or inside the house, and I was really surprised," Kilzer wrote in a post on her blog. "She started to refuse to see boys that had gone through puberty, as she had consulted a religious figure and he had told her it was sacrilegious. She was often fasting."

Kilzer wrote that Tsarnaeva was a loving and supportive mother, and she felt sympathy for her plight after the April 15 bombings. But she stopped visiting the family's home for spa treatments in late 2011 or early 2012 when, during one session, she "started quoting a conspiracy theory, telling me that she thought 9/11 was purposefully created by the American government to make America hate Muslims."

"It's real," Tsarnaeva said, according to Kilzer. "My son knows all about it. You can read on the Internet." In the spring of 2010, Zubeidat's eldest son got married in a ceremony at a Boston mosque that no one in the family had previously attended. Tamerlan and his wife, Katherine Russell, a Rhode Island native and convert from Christianity, now have a child who is about 3 years old.

Zubeidat married into a Chechen family but was an outsider. She is an Avar, from one of the dozens of ethnic groups in Dagestan. Her native village is now a hotbed of an ultraconservative strain of Islam known as Salafism or Wahabbism. It is unclear whether religious differences fueled tension in their family. Anzor and Zubeidat divorced in 2011.
About the same time, there was a brief FBI investigation into Tamerlan Tsarnaev, prompted by a tip from Russia's security service.

The vague warning from the Russians was that Tamerlan, an amateur boxer in the U.S., was a follower of radical Islam who had changed drastically since 2010. That led the FBI to interview Tamerlan at the family's home in Cambridge. Officials ultimately placed his name, and his mother's name, on various watch lists, but the inquiry was closed in late spring of 2011.

After the bombings, Russian authorities told U.S. investigators they had secretly recorded a phone conversation in which Zubeidat had vaguely discussed jihad with Tamerlan. The Russians also recorded Zubeidat talking to someone in southern Russia who is under FBI investigation in an unrelated case, according to U.S. officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the investigation with reporters.

The conversations are significant because, had they been revealed earlier, they might have been enough evidence for the FBI to initiate a more thorough investigation of the Tsarnaev family. Anzor's brother, Ruslan Tsarni, told the AP from his home in Maryland that he believed his former sister-in-law had a "big-time influence" on her older son's growing embrace of his Muslim faith and decision to quit boxing and school.

While Tamerlan was living in Russia for six months in 2012, Zubeidat, who had remained in the U.S., was arrested at a shopping mall in the suburb of Natick, Mass., and accused of trying to shoplift $1,624 worth of women's clothing from a department store. She failed to appear in court to answer the charges that fall, and instead left the country.
___

Seddon reported from Makhachkala, Russia. Associated Press writers Eileen Sullivan and Matt Apuzzo contributed to this report from Washington.

 

[Motaro]

Exclusive: Boston bomb suspects' parents retreat to village, cancel U.S. trip

Anzor Tsarnaev, father of Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev - the two men suspected of carrying out the Boston bombings, looks on during an interview with Reuters at an undisclosed location in Russia's North Caucasus, April 28, 2013. Credit: Reuters/Maxim Shemetov

By Maria Golovnina
UNDISCLOSED LOCATION IN NORTH CAUCASUS, Russia | Sun Apr 28, 2013 2:42pm EDT

(Reuters) - The parents of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects have retreated to a village in southern Russia to shelter from the spotlight and abandoned plans for now to travel to the United States, the father of the suspects told Reuters on Sunday.

Speaking in the garden of a large house, Anzor Tsarnaev said he believed he would not be allowed to see his surviving son DzhokharŸ, who was captured and has been charged in connection with the April 15 bomb blasts that killed three people and wounded 264.

"Unfortunately I can't help my child in any way. I am in touch with Dzhokhar's and my own lawyers. They told me they would let me know (what to do)," Tsarnaev said in an interview in the village where he relocated with the suspects' mother.

He agreed to the face-to-face meeting on condition that the village's location in the North Caucasus, a string of mainly Muslim provinces in southern Russia, not be disclosed.

"I am not going back to the United States. For now I am here. I am ill," said Tsarnaev, pacing nervously in the garden at sunset in the quiet village set in rolling hills and surrounded by cow pastures.

His face gaunt and tired, Tsarnaev said he suffered from high blood pressure and a heart condition.

Tsarnaev had said in the North Caucasus province of Dagestan on Thursday that he planned to travel to the United States to see Dzhokhar and bury his elder son, Tamerlan, who was killed during a manhunt four days after the bombings.

In Sunday's interview he said he had decided to move away from the family home in Dagestan to the new location because he wanted to keep a low profile.

Dressed in a black shirt and black trousers, he passionately defended his sons' innocence, saying they had nothing to do with Islamist extremists.

"I feel hopeless. We are simple people. We are trying to understand. We are attacked from all sides," he said, clutching his head in despair.

"I don't know whether I should talk or stay silent. I don't want to harm my child. ... We are used to all sorts of things here but we didn't expect this from the United States."

He and other members of the family believe a man shown on television being led naked into a police car the night of the shootout was Tamerlan, and that the blurry footage, still widely available on YouTube, proves Tamerlan was captured alive. Boston police say Tamerlan was killed in a shootout, and the man seen being led into the car was a bystander who was briefly detained.

Anzor Tsarnaev said he raised the issue with U.S. officials who visited him earlier in the week in his home in Dagestan.

"I asked them: 'I saw my child alive, he was being put into a police vehicle alive and healthy. How come media said he was killed?' They were shocked themselves," the father said.

CAUCASUS ROOTS

The Tsarnaevs are ethnic Chechens who lived in the Central Asian country of Kyrgyzstan and in Dagestan before emigrating to the United States with their children. The parents returned to Dagestan two years ago, and Tamerlan spent the first half of 2012 there.

The suspects' mother, Zubeidat, was with Anzor Tsarnaev in the village but did not wish to speak.

"She is ill, she is shocked, she is depressed. She lost her children," Tsarnaev said. The couple are divorced but have stayed together.

Although the Tsarnaev brothers have roots in Dagestan and neighboring Chechnya, neither had spent much time there until Tamerlan returned to Dagestan last year for six months.

During his interview, Anzor Tsarnaev denied Tamerlan had any contact with militants during his stay, painting an idyllic picture of his son's visit to his ancestral homeland.

"When he came to stay here, he was a good boy. He read books, (Leo) Tolstoy, (Alexandre) Dumas and thick English language books. He would wake up late and read all day, late into the night," he said.

"Sometimes we went to the mosque. We went to see our relatives, in Dagestan, in Chechnya. We visited a lot of households, it was a nice atmosphere."

Tsarnaev said he had to force his son to return to the United States to complete his U.S. citizenship application after Tamerlan tried to convince his family to allow him to stay in Dagestan for good.

"I told him: 'No, you have to go back to obtain your U.S. citizenship'. I forced him to go back. I thought it was the right thing to do. I shouldn't have done that," he said with a pained expression on his face.

The father said he had no hope that Tamerlan's body would be released by the U.S. authorities to be buried in his homeland.

"They won't give us his body," he said, his voice breaking with emotion. "We wont be able to bury him in our land."

(Writing by Maria Golovnina)

 

[MrBlueSky]

Boston bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev tried to brainwash me into being a fanatic, says ex-girlfriend

News Limited Network
April 29, 201312:06PM

• Nadine Ascencao dated Tamerlan for three years
  
• 'I was in love and scared' she tells paper

Tamerlan Tsarnaev, suspected mastermind of the Boston bombings. A former girlfriend claims he tried to brainwash her. Picture: Splash Australia Source: The Sunday Telegraph

AN ex-girlfriend of dead Boston bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev has told how he tried to brainwash her into becoming a Muslim fanatic who hated America.

Nadine Ascencao, 24, said Tamerlan made her wear a hijab and pray to Allah and slapped her when she wore Western clothes, The Sun reports.

“I went to his mosque a couple of times and even looked into converting to make him happy. I thought, ‘This is crazy’ - but I still did it for him.

“I was in love and scared he’d leave me if I didn’t do what he said. Looking back I had a lucky escape.”

The pair dated for three years. In that time, Ascencao watched him change from a pot-smoking, party-loving teenager into a violent extremist, she told The Sun.

“One minute he’s this funny, normal guy who liked boxing and having fun, the next he is praying four times a day, watching Islamic videos and talking insane nonsense,” she said.

“He became extremely religious and tried to brainwash me to follow Islam. He wanted me to hate America like he did.”

Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, was killed in a shootout with police four days after the Boston Marathon bomb attack which killed three people and wounded more than 260.

Katherine Russell, the widow of Boston bomb suspect, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, was 'an all-American girl who was brainwashed' by her extremist husband according to one school friend. Photo: MailOnline.com/SOLO Syndication

His brother Dzhokhar, 19, has been charged with using a weapon of mass destruction and also has been charged with one count of malicious destruction of property by means of deadly explosives over the April 15 attack.

He is in custody awaiting the next step in the legal process.

In an earlier interview, Ascencao claimed the man she once lived with did not appear to be capable of "anything major".

"He was a little tough guy, but I thought that was it," she told the Wall Street Journal. "In high school, everybody acts like that. Like a bully guy, you know?"

Ascencao was the woman who Tsarnaev was accused of assaulting in 2009, The WSJ reported.

She told police he had slapped her in the face during an argument over another woman - presumably Katherine Russell, whom Tamerlan met at a club that year and went on to marry in 2010 - at his home in Cambridge.

Ascencao was "crying hysterically" and called 911 to report that she was "beat up by her boyfriend", Cambridge Police Officer Angela Pereira wrote in the arrest report.

Tsarnaev admitted to slapping her and was arrested on charges of assault and battery, the complaint said. The charges were dismissed before trial.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is being held in prison and is awaiting a further hearing on may 30. (AP Photo/vk.com)

Tsarnaev's widow, Katherine Russell, was "an all-American girl who was brainwashed" by her extremist husband according to one school friend.

School friends say Katherine Russell was "totally transformed" by Tsarnaev, reports the Mail Online.

"She was just this All-American girl who was brainwashed by her super-religious husband.

"Nobody understands what happened to her.

"None of us would have dreamed that she would marry so young or drop out of college and have a baby or convert or be part of any of what’s happened."

Katherine was a student at Sussex University, Boston, when she met Tsaraev, then a promising boxer and athlete in 2009.

It was during that time that she converted and her youthful priorities appear to have changed as she left in 2010 without graduating. She had a child, Zahara, now 3.

Russell saw Tamerlan Tsarnaev just hours before the marathon bombing but had "no idea" of the plot.

 

[Motaro]

The Boston-Bomber Trail: Fresh Clues in Rural Dagestan

By Simon Shuster April 29, 2013

The cemetery in the village of Utamysh, in the southern Russian region of Dagestan, where William Plotnikov was buried after a shootout with Russian counterterrorism forces in July 2012.

The incongruous tombstone of a Canadian mujahid stands on a lush hill at the edge of Utamysh, a village in southern Russia’s Dagestan region, within reach of the salty breeze that comes off the Caspian Sea. The riddles of the life it demarcates — the ones U.S. investigators are now reportedly studying in connection to the Boston Marathon bombings — start to become apparent even from the stone’s inscription.

For one, the name says William Plotnikov, an unusual fusion of English and Russian that hints at his family’s move from Siberia to the West. Then there is the stone’s Islamic crescent moon and star, suggesting a conversion to Islam — as do the weeds that grow over the swollen mound of earth. (In local Muslim tradition, it is forbidden to pluck fresh weeds from a grave site, because they are thought to help the dead atone for sins.) And then there are the grim dates: born in Russia on May 3, 1989, Plotnikov was killed in a shootout with Russia’s counterterrorism forces on July 14, 2012. He was 23.

For American investigators, the date of Plotnikov’s death has reportedly been of particular interest. Just a few days after Plotnikov was killed in Dagestan, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the prime suspect in the Boston bombings, left the region and went back to the U.S. in an apparent hurry. He did not even wait to pick up his new Russian passport, which his parents claim to be the reason he came to Russia in the first place.

The parallels between Plotnikov’s and Tsarnaev’s biographies are also striking. Both their families have roots in predominantly Muslim regions of Russia — Plotnikov’s mother is Tatar; Tsarnaev’s parents are from the North Caucasus. Both of them became avid amateur boxers in North America after their families emigrated there. Both of them embraced radical Islam while grasping around for an identity in their adopted homes. Both of them came to Dagestan to explore their faith. And both of them were in Dagestan between January and July last year, when Plotnikov had already joined an Islamist militant group and Tsarnaev was attending services at a radical mosque.

There is no clear evidence to show that the two of them met or knew each other. But on Saturday, Russia’s Novaya Gazeta, an independent newspaper with a strong reputation for investigative reporting, wrote that Tsarnaev first drew the attention of Russia’s FSB security service because of his connection to Plotnikov. In early 2011, the FSB’s counterterrorism agents detained Plotnikov as an “adherent of radical Islam” in Dagestan, and Tsarnaev’s name came up during the interrogation, Novaya Gazeta reported. The FSB then sent its first request to the FBI asking for information on Tsarnaev, who was then living in the U.S. In response, the FBI said it interviewed Tsarnaev in Boston but found no links to terrorist activity. U.S. investigators are now trying to determine whether the two men met in Dagestan, the New York Times reported on Sunday, citing a law-enforcement official.

On Friday afternoon in the village of Utamysh — home to about 3,000 people, most of them ethnic Kumyks — TIME showed photos of Tsarnaev to the family that Plotnikov lived with, and after studying the images they all shook their heads without recognizing him. “I don’t know,” says Maryam, the woman who said she was “like a mother” to Plotnikov in Dagestan. (She asked that her last name not be published, fearing that she would be hounded by investigators and the press.) “Maybe they knew each other through boxing. But I never saw him here,” she says of Tsarnaev.

Maryam said Plotnikov fell in with the local Islamist insurgents after attending services at a local mosque that espoused a fundamentalist brand of Islam called Salafism, which calls for an Islamic caliphate governed by Shari‘a. “All of those boys died with him,” she says. In a statement released in July, the Russian security services said they had cornered a group of militants in the forests around Utamysh. In the ensuing firefight, which lasted much of the early morning of July 14, seven militants were killed, including the leader of a local militant group named Islam Magomedov. Plotnikov was among the dead, and a local jihadist website later mourned him as a martyr.

The local police chief in Utamysh, Murtuzali Abdurakhmanov, confirmed to TIME that Plotnikov had been a member of a terrorist group in the village and was killed in a counterinsurgency operation. “Everybody knew him as the Canadian,” he says in an interview at the local police station. “We don’t get a lot of outsiders around here, so his story made a lot of noise.” But Abdurakhmanov did not recognize the name or the photographs of Tsarnaev. “We’d probably have heard if an American had come around to see him.”

When police brought Plotnikov’s body back to the village from the forest in July, the congregants at the mosque washed it and prepared it for burial, Imam Arslangerey, of the mosque where Plotnikov worshipped, tells TIME. “It was not bloated like you would expect after that much time had passed. He looked like he was sleeping.” A local businessman, he says, had donated the money for his gravestone, which was set apart from the other graves at the very end of the cemetery that creeps up a hill on the edge of the village, overlooking a pasture where locals graze their cows. “He was a member of our community,” says the imam. “He was a Muslim. So whatever he may have been involved with, he deserved a traditional burial.”

According to a detailed report in Canada’s National Post last year, Plotnikov had converted to Islam in 2009 while living with his parents outside Toronto. Only three years later, he was killed as an insurgent in the mountains of Dagestan. “How can the mind of a person be changed in such a short period of time?” his father Vitaly Plotnikov asked the National Post. The same question now hovers around the fate of Tsarnaev, who embraced a radical version of his faith less than three years before the Boston bombings.

Citing its sources in the Russian security services, Novaya Gazeta also reported that Tsarnaev had met multiple times in Dagestan with a suspected Islamist named Mahmud Mansur Nidal, an 18-year-old with mixed Kumyk and Palestinian ancestry. Russian operatives had been watching Nidal for a year as a suspected recruiter for local Islamist groups, according to Novaya Gazeta. That was why the FSB sent further requests to U.S. law-enforcement agencies after Tsarnaev’s alleged meetings with Nidal in Dagestan last year. Nidal was killed in a shootout with Russian police in May 2012, about two months before Tsarnaev went back to Boston from Dagestan.

The U.S. investigation into the bombings of April 15 now seems to have turned to the role Tsarnaev’s contacts in Dagestan played in his radicalization. In the coming days and weeks, it seems inevitable that the sleepy, dirt-road village of Utamysh will also start getting a lot more foreign visitors. At the police station, which is no more than a one-room hut with a few rickety chairs, police chief Abdurakhmanov prepared for this prospect with the typical nonchalance of the locals. “Maybe I’ll go on vacation,” he says.

 

[MrBlueSky]

Boston bombings: FBI takes bags of evidence from home of Tamerlan Tsarnaev's wife

Federal investigators removed bags of evidence from a home where the widow of suspected Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev has been living, according to reports.

Katherine Russell, right, leaves the law office of DeLuca and Weizenbaum with Amato DeLuca Photo: AP

By Reuters
1:39AM BST 30 Apr 2013

FBI agents spent hours at the home of Katherine Russell's parents in North Kingstown, Rhode Island, and came out carrying bags market DNA samples, a person familiar with the case said.

Investigators are hunting for evidence that suspects Tamerlan Tsarnaev, Mrs Russell's dead husband, and his younger brother Dzhokhar Tsarnaev made and set off two bombs at the finish line of the race two weeks ago.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday that investigators have found female DNA on at least one of the bombs used in the attacks.

The FBI declined to comment on the matter.

Police said the Tsarnaevs set off twin bombs on April 15 that ripped through the crowd watching the race on Boylston Street, killing three and injuring 264. The Tsarnaevs three days later led police in a wild car chase through metropolitan Boston, throwing grenades and exchanging gunfire as the officers closed in.

Mrs Russell, 24, said through her lawyer last week that she was doing everything she could to assist officials with the investigation.

Her lawyers have not said anything else, but a person familiar with the matter said the legal team has been negotiating how much access authorities will have to their client.

FBI agents have been seen at the Russell house and at her lawyer's office several times since she returned to Rhode Island from Massachusetts on Friday, April 19, after her husband was killed. On Monday afternoon she was seen leaving the house with her lawyers and was later seen leaving her lawyers' offices in Providence, Rhode Island.

Mrs Russell and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, lived with their young daughter in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Police have said they found bomb material in that apartment.

Her lawyers have said she didn't know much about her husband's activities because she spent most of her time working as a health aide near Boston while he was home watching the child.

Edited by Bonnie Malkin

 

[Kratos]

Boston marathon bomb suspects' family 'received $100,000 in benefits'

The two brothers involved in the Boston bombings and their family received as much as $100,000 (£65,000) in government benefits from Massachusetts, according to reports.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev (left) and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev

By Daniel Easterman
2:13PM BST 30 Apr 2013

In the documents yet to be released publicly, an anonymous source with direct knowledge of the details told the Boston Herald that the welfare payments received over a ten year period were "stunning" in their breadth.

A full-scale investigation by a committee of the US House of Representatives is set be launched shortly to determine how the substantial sums involved were authorised and why they were granted over such an extended period of time.

David Linksy, a Massachusetts congressman told the Herald that the committee would thoroughly review all the details of the case and that the public has a "substantial right to know what benefits, if any, this family or individuals accused of some horrific crimes were receiving".

Prior to the release of the $100,000 figure, it had also been reported that Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the 26-year-old dead suspect,together with his wife Katherine directly received a combination of tax-payer funded "assistance" in the form of food stamps and cash payments.

It also emerged that an additional type of welfare called TAFDC (Transitional Aid to Families with Dependent Children) was deposited directly to Tsarnaev's wife's account as assistance of this kind is usually only provided for US citizens.

The younger brother, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, who is currently being treated for his wounds at the Fort Devons medical detention center, 40 miles from Boston, is not considered to have been a direct beneficiary of the family's state assistance in recent years.

Dzhokhar was the recipient of a scholarship from the University of Massachusetts and it is claimed that he also earned extra cash from minor marijuana dealing. The bombing attack itself was fairly unsophisticated and could be implemented relatively cheaply say security experts.

 

[MrBlueSky]

Saudis’ Boston warning
Told US last year

By JOE TACOPINO
Last Updated: 3:41 AM, May 1, 2013
Posted: 2:14 AM, May 1, 2013

Saudi Arabian officials gave the United States a written warning about Boston bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev months before the attack, a new report says.

Officials in the oil-rich kingdom sent a letter to the US Department of Homeland Security in 2012, detailing their concerns about Tamerlan Tsarnaev and indicating he might have been planning an attack, the Daily Mail reports today.

“It was very specific” a Saudi official told the Mail.

He said the letter mentioned Tsarnaev’s name and warned that “something was going to happen in a major US city.”

The information arose through Saudi intelligence- gathering in Yemen, the paper said, although the specific source of that info was not revealed.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev

The Saudis were so concerned that they denied Tsarnaev a visa to visit the holy city of Mecca in 2011.

The report came to light as President Obama called for a review of the warning signs that appeared in the years before the April 15 attack took place, including an alarm sounded by Russia over Tsarnaev.

“We want to leave no stone unturned,” Obama said during a news conference.“Based on what I’ve seen so far, the FBI performed its duties. Department of Homeland Security did what it was supposed to be doing.”

The information from the Saudi government was also shared with Great Britain. It was unclear, however, whether DHS officials received the information.

One Homeland Security official confirmed to the Daily Mail that he had, in fact, heard of the letter, but another denied that DHS had received intelligence from Saudi Arabia.

The White House also denied that a Saudi warning existed.

“We and other relevant US government agencies have no record of such a letter being received,” a spokesperson for the president’s National Security Council told the Mail.

A GOP staffer said that it was possible that Homeland Security received the intel but never passed it on to the White House.

Meanwhile yesterday, Tsarnaev’s widow, Katherine Russell, 24, asked Massachusetts authorities for permission to claim his body, her lawyer said.

No decision on what will happen to the remains has yet been made.

 

[Motaro]

Tsarnaev homeland Chechnya: rebuilt from war, ruled by fear

By Maria Golovnina
GROZNY, Russia | Wed May 1, 2013 6:37am EDT

(Reuters) - When it was last in the international spotlight, Chechnya was in ruins, its capital Grozny reduced to dust by the deadliest artillery and air onslaught in Europe since World War Two.

Today, when the naming of two Chechens as suspects in the Boston Marathon bombings has put it back on the world's front pages, Chechnya appears almost miraculously reborn.

The streets have been rebuilt. Walls riddled with bullet holes are long gone. New high rise buildings soar into the sky. Spotless playgrounds are packed with children. A giant marble mosque glimmers in the night.

Yet, scratch the surface and the miracle is less impressive than it seems. Behind closed doors, people speak of a warped and oppressive place, run by a Kremlin-imposed leader through fear.

The heavily guarded skyscrapers of the newly built Grozny City complex are windswept and empty. At night, the streets are deserted.

Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev's ethnic homeland, a mainly Muslim province that saw centuries of war and repression, no longer threatens to secede from Russia. But it has become breeding ground for a form of militant Islam whose adherents have spread violence to other parts of Russia, and may have inspired the radicalization of the Boston bombers.

"It may look like it's stable and peaceful but it's really not the case," said a human rights campaigner, who, like others daring to express any criticism of the Moscow-backed Chechen leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, asked that her name not be used.

There are still fragmented groups of rebel fighters in the mountains, the activist added. "And there are young people in the villages who go out and join them, who take food to the mountains."

SUSHI, IPHONES AND ISLAM

Moscow has poured billions of roubles into Chechnya to rebuild it. It boasts that there is no longer any trace of the separatist insurgency that humiliated the Russian army in battles in the 1990s.

On top of what was once the rubble of Grozny's central Minutka Square - where an armored column of Russian forces was nearly wiped out in street fighting in January 1995 - there are now slick cafes where young men in leather jackets and women in headscarves eat sushi and tap on their iPhones.

Kadyrov, a 36-year-old former rebel, peers down from billboards and out from TV newscasts. A red neon slogan declares "Ramzan, thank you for Grozny!"

A stocky man with a neatly trimmed beard and intense grey eyes, he cultivates an image as a devout Muslim and family man, fond of posting snapshots on Internet photo service Instagram.

He loves a good party, especially when he is the guest of honor. In 2011 he hired singer Seal and Hollywood stars Jean-Claude Van Damme and Hilary Swank to appear at his birthday jubilee. After human rights groups complained, Swank apologized, fired her manager and gave her six-figure fee to charity.

Kadyrov and his authorities deny they are involved in abuse, murders or disappearances. But his critics have a long history of dying in unsolved murders or disappearing without a trace.

Human rights groups have linked Kadyrov to the murders of Russian opposition-minded journalist Anna Politkovskaya, Chechen exiles in Austria and Turkey, and rival Chechen clan chiefs shot dead in Moscow and Dubai, all cases in which he denies involvement.

Russian human rights activist Natalya Estemirova was abducted in Grozny in 2009 and later found dead. Rights groups list the names of up to 5,000 Chechens who are still missing.

Kadyrov's office said he was not available for interview.

His loyalty can be embarrassing even for the Kremlin. At the last elections, President Vladimir Putin and his ruling United Russia party won more than 99 percent of Chechnya's vote, with Soviet-style turnout over 99 percent.

Grozny's central thoroughfare is now named after Putin.

"What's happening here is absurd. It's George Orwell, 1984," said a dissident who asked that his identity not be revealed. "Nothing is going to change here any time soon. Chechen spring? Forget about it."

GOLDEN CHANDELIER

In Grozny, passersby freeze and stare with a mixture of fear and awe when Kadyrov's noisy motorcade glides through the city.

His closest allies drive luxury sedans with tinted windows and distinctive "KRA" number plates - his initials: "Kadyrov, Ramzan Akhmatovich".

Kadyrov's father Akhmad Kadyrov was a former rebel mufti who was put in charge of Chechnya by Putin and ruled it until he was assassinated in 2004. A museum to the elder Kadyrov sports Russia's biggest chandelier, weighing 1.5 metric tons (1.65 tons) and containing 22 kg (48 pounds) of gold. It was made in Iran.

Perhaps in an attempt to limit the influence of Islamist rebels by co-opting religion, Kadyrov has banned alcohol and gambling, and promoted polygamy and headscarves for women. A few years ago, his supporters were seen firing paintball guns at women whose clothes were deemed insufficiently modest.

Yet Kadyrov's promotion of Islam has not dimmed the appeal of the radical version espoused by fighters led by Doku Umarov, a Chechen former pro-independence guerrilla commander who leads an Islamist revolt focused mainly on neighboring Dagestan.

"When they tell us that only this official form of Islam is allowed, obviously everyone is going to question it," said the rights campaigner. "People don't like to be lectured on how to be faithful."

DEVOTION AND RESENTMENT

As in Soviet times, it is impossible to say what Chechens truly think of their leader. When questioned in public, residents reply with stock phrases of devotion.

"I don't know what would have happened to us without our leader," said Fatima Magomedova, 44, a heavily veiled flower shop worker. "We are free now."

Many are no doubt sincere in their admiration for Kadyrov, who has brought peace and relative prosperity after a decade of war killed tens of thousands of people, mainly civilians.

"I don't think many people want to leave. In fact, a lot of Chechens say they want to come back. Those who are leaving are those who are after an easy life," said Khamza Khirakhmatov, a deputy to Chechnya's official spiritual leader.

"Those who want to achieve something, a certain success, are only coming back, getting jobs, getting involved in projects to promote morality and spirituality and help our republic."

But outside the glitzy city center lies an impoverished country where joblessness is close to 80 percent in some regions. Many flock to Grozny in search of work, but complain that jobs are reserved for those in Kadyrov's clan.

"It's very hard. There is almost no work. I've been out of work for years. All the main construction sites are operated by Ramzan's people and it's impossible to get a job there because everyone wants to work there," said Lyoma, a man from the town of Urus-Martan, waiting for work on the side of the road with other unemployed laborers from around Chechnya.

Outside Grozny, Chechens survive off small-scale agriculture in villages scattered across a fertile belt between the capital and the towering, snow-capped Caucasus mountains to the south.

"People live off farming. They eat what they grow," said Yusup, a local resident in the mountain village of Itum-Kale perched in a steep river valley near Chechnya's border with Georgia. "It's beautiful here but there is no work for young people."

Others dream of leaving.

Rukiyat Arsayeva went to Grozny to apply for a passport in the hope of travelling to Europe. She said she was seeking medical help for her two daughters.

One, now 14, was a toddler when she was wounded in the abdomen by a Russian air strike. The other, now 20, was made deaf as a child by a missile blast.

Their mother said she feared the Boston bombings would make it harder for Chechens to get visas to escape to the West.

"Chechens are now going to be seen as bad people. We are not terrorists. After what happened I don't know what kind of treatment to expect there," she said nervously, clutching her paperwork on a dusty street outside the passport office.

"What happened in Boston is very bad. I am a small person. All I want is to help my children."

(Editing by Peter Graff)

 

[Motaro]

Boston bomb suspect’s widow wants Tsarnaev family to get remains

SVEA HERBST-BAYLISS, REUTERS

FIRST POSTED: TUESDAY, APRIL 30, 2013 08:44 PM EDT | UPDATED: TUESDAY, APRIL 30, 2013 09:05 PM EDT

Tamerlan Tsarnaev pictured in 2010 in Lowell, Massachusetts, in an undated FBI handout photo. REUTERS/The Sun of Lowell, MA/FBI/Handout

PROVIDENCE, R.I. - The widow of Boston Marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev wants a medical examiner to release his remains to the Tsarnaev family, her lawyer said on Tuesday.

“It is Katherine Russell’s wish that his remains be released to the Tsarnaev family, and we will communicate her wishes to the proper authorities,” Amato DeLuca said in a statement.

Investigators have questioned Russell as they seek clues about how Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, and his younger brother Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, allegedly built the bombs and whether they had help.

The 24-year-old widow, who returned to her family in Rhode Island days after the blasts, has spent hours meeting with FBI agents at her home and at her lawyer’s office in Providence.

Police say the ethnic Chechen brothers set off twin bombs on April 15 that ripped through the crowd watching the race, killing three and injuring 264. The elder brother died in an April 19 gun battle with police, while the younger brother was arrested a day later and has been charged with crimes that carry the possibility of the death penalty.

“In the coming days, Katherine will continue to meet with law enforcement, as she has done for many hours over the past week, and provide as much assistance to the investigation as she can,” DeLuca said.

On Monday, FBI investigators took DNA samples from the Russell home in North Kingstown. Officials are trying to determine who else may have handled the pressure cookers that contained the bombs after they found a woman’s DNA on at least one of them, an official said.

Also on Monday, an autopsy on Tamerlan Tsarnaev determined precisely how he died after a bloody shootout with police but the results can’t be made public until the body is claimed, a spokesman for the Massachusetts Medical Examiner said. The spokesman could not be reached for immediate comment on Tuesday evening.

Authorities and the public have been waiting to learn whether Tsarnaev died in a hail of police bullets or whether he was run over by his younger brother when the younger Tsarnaev fled in an SUV the pair had allegedly stolen.

The brothers’ parents, now living in Russia, said on Sunday that they have abandoned initial plans to come to the United States to claim their older son’s body and visit their younger son, who is currently being held at a prison medical facility.

But the young men have other family, including uncles, living in the United States.

 

[MrBlueSky]

3 more suspects connected to Boston bombing taken into custody

By JENNIFER BAIN in Cambridge, Mass. and DAN MacLEOD in New York
Last Updated: 1:23 AM, May 2, 2013
Posted: 11:22 AM, May 1, 2013

Medical workers aid those injured in the Boston Marathon terror attack.

Real funny.

Boston bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev didn’t have a care in the world as an army of feds and cops hunted him for the marathon attacks — texting “lol” to a pal who warned him his face was plastered on the news.

“You better not text me,” Tsarnaev, 19, warned Dias Kadyrbayev on April 18 after his friend told him about seeing the photos on the TV news.

Kadyrbayev and another pal, Azamat Tazhayakov, both 19, were charged yesterday with helping him cover up the April 15 attack, which killed three and wounded over 260, the feds charged today.

A third pal, Robel Phillipos, also 19, was charged with lying to feds about the alleged conspiracy.

About a month before the attacks, Tsarnaev bragged during a meal that he knew “how to make a bomb,” according to the affidavit signed by FBI Special Agent Scott P. Cieplik.

The night authorities released the photos, Kadyrbayev, Tazhayakov and Phillipos had gone to Tsarnaev’s UMass-Dartmouth dorm room to hang out.

“Before they went in, Kadyrbayev showed Tazhayakov a text message from Tsarnaev that stated, ‘I’m about to leave if you need something in my room take it,’” according to the affidavit.

From left, Azamat Tazhayakov and Dias Kadyrbayev, from Kazakhstan, with Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev in Times Square.

“When Tazhayakov learned of this message, he believed he would never see Tsarnaev alive again,” the court papers say.

They went inside the apartment and spotted a backpack that held empty fireworks tubes.

“Kadyrbayev knew when he saw the empty fireworks that Tsarnaev was involved in the Marathon bombing,” the affadavit says. “[He] decided to remove the backpack from the room in order to help his friend Tsarnaev avoid trouble.”

He also grabbed the terrorist’s laptop.

They took the items back to their New Bedford apartment, and saw Tsarnaev and his brother plastered all over the news.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, left, and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19.

That’s when Kadyrbayev sent the text to Tsarnaev and got the “lol” response — which stands for “laughing out loud.”

The friends gave conflicting statements to the feds about what happened next.

Kadyrbayev told investigators they tossed the backpack — which contained empty fireworks — in a nearby dumpster before the Tsarnaev brothers were named as the official suspects, the court documents say.

Tazhayakov said they threw out the items on April 19 after the names were released.

Authorities found the bag in a landfill, though it’s unclear what happened to the laptop.

This undated photo found on the VK page of Dias Kadyrbayev shows Kadyrbayev, left, with Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.

Tazhayakov and Kadyrbayev — who drive around in a BMW with a novelty license plate, “Terrorista #1” — were charged yesterday, but were already in custody for allegedly violating their student visas.

Tazhayakov was allowed to return to the U.S. from his native Kazakhstan in January — even though he was no longer in school.

Kadyrbayev was skipping classes.

They made their first appearance yesterday in federal court and were read the charges.

Phillipos was scolded at one point by Federal Judge Marianne Bowler, who said, “I suggest you pay attention to me rather than looking down.”

Tazhayakov’s lawyer, Harlan Protass, said after court, “My client feels horrible” and “has cooperated fully with the authorities.”

Kadyrbayev’s lawyer, Robert Stahl, denied his client did anything wrong.

“Mr. Kadyrbayev told the FBI about that [where to find the backpack]. He did not know those items were involved in a bombing,” he said.

Derege Demissie, Phillipo’s lawyer, “The only allegation is he made a misrepresentation.”

Their arrests come more than two weeks after the Tsarnaev brothers detonated a pair of pressure cooker bombs at the packed marathon finish line on Patriots’ Day.

Next week, the House Homeland Security Committee will hold hearings on the bombings to determine if federal authorities could have prevented the attack.

It will include testimony by Boston Police Commissioner Edward Davis, Massachusetts homeland security chief Kurt Schwartz and Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.).

Meanwhile, the Boston transit cop critically wounded in a wild shootout with the Tsarnaevs said yesterday he had “almost no blood and no pulse” when doctors “miraculously” saved his life.

“When the full story of that evening is accounted for, it will be wilder than any movie you have ever seen,” blogged Richard “Dic” Donahue, 33, who was shot in the thigh.

“My wife has informed me that the bullet will ultimately cause her the most pain, as I will be using it to get out of things like mowing the lawn, doing laundry or painting the deck,” he wrote.

 

[MrBlueSky]

Wounded Boston transit cop thanks those who aided him, jokes about bullet left in leg

By ANDY SOLTIS
Last Updated: 2:44 PM, May 1, 2013
Posted: 2:25 PM, May 1, 2013

The Boston transit cop critically wounded in the shootout with the Tsarnaev brother said today he had “almost no blood or pulse” when he was rushed to the hospital.

Richard “Dic” Donahue blogged his thanks to everyone who helped save his life two weeks ago.

“I cannot begin to properly thank everyone involved in my recovery, as many fearless individuals stepped up and acted heroically that night,” he wrote on the Boston transit police Web site.

“I am told that when I arrived at the hospital I had almost no blood or pulse, and the team of medical experts at Mount Auburn (hospital) miraculously brought me back to life.”

TDPNews Officer Richard Donohue and his wife.

Donahue, 33, a three-year veteran of the department, remained on a ventilator for days after being wounded in the Watertown firefight.

But he said he can walk with the aid of a walker and expects a “100 percent” recovery.

Donahue said a bullet will be left in his leg but managed to joke about it.

“However, my wife has informed me that the bullet will ultimately cause her the most pain, as I will be using it to get out of things like mowing the lawn, doing laundry or painting the deck,” he wrote.

 

[Motaro]

Boston Marathon bombers initially eyed Fourth of July terror blast; body claimed

By JENNIFER BAIN in Cambridge, Mass., and DAN MACLEOD
Last Updated: 6:32 AM, May 3, 2013
Posted: 1:32 AM, May 3, 2013

The Boston Marathon bombers originally planned to launch their attack on the Fourth of July — but moved up the date when they finished building their arsenal sooner than they expected, it was revealed yesterday.

Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev wanted to set off the explosives on Independence Day, officials told NBC.

Dzhokhar, 19, told investigators the homemade pressure-cooker bombs were assembled in Tamerlan’s basement.

The latest twist in the case came as Tamerlan’s body was finally claimed by his family last night.

The remains were transferred to the Dyer-Lake Funeral Home in North Attleboro, Mass.

GOOD RIDDANCE: A hearse bearing the body of Tamerlan Tsarnaev (above) yesterday arrives at a Massachusetts funeral home.

GOOD RIDDANCE: A hearse (above) bearing the body of Tamerlan Tsarnaev yesterday arrives at a Massachusetts funeral home.

The hearse was met last night by 50 demonstrators shouting and waving American flags.

“This is my hometown. It’s unimaginable to me that he’s here,” said Shannon Silzestri, who was at the marathon on April 15 with her two teenage children when the bombs detonated.

Silzestri went to the marathon to watch her husband cross the finish line, and lost partial hearing when the bombs went off.

“I haven’t slept a full night,” she said outside the funeral home. “I’m in disbelief. This is terrorizing me all over again.”

Other residents were appalled that the funeral home would take Tamerlan’s remains.

“This is a slap in the face to the Boston police, to the victims, to our town,” said Debbie Horner. “This is a well-known establishment, but now I hope they lose business.”

Tamerlan was killed in a shootout with cops last month as he and Dzhokhar led authorities on a wild chase.

The exact cause of death has not been disclosed but could be known as soon as today, according to the Massachusetts Department of Public Safety.

Just before the chaos, Dzhokhar, who was charged with using a weapon of mass destruction in the attack that killed three and injured more than 260, texted “LOL” to a pal who said Dzhokhar resembled a suspect in surveillance pictures made public.

The pal and another Dzhokhar friend were collared Wednesday in an alleged scheme to cover up Dzhokhar’s involvement in the attack, and another man was charged with lying to authorities about the alleged plot, feds said.