UPDATE: The body of TAMERLAN Tsarnaev body was laid to rest yesterday at an undisclosed location. His wife is still cooperative with officials and the female DNA found on one of the bombs, is not her blood. The female has not been identified just yet.
The world has more questions and authorities are seeking answers to the motives behind the Boston Marathon attacks. Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s life is the focus of the investigations.
The FBI sought to question Tamerlan’s American wife, Katherine Russell, who was seen recently leaving Tsarnaev’s Cambridge apartment with her three-year old daughter. Although she may not seem to be American, she is originally from Rhode, but converted to Islam and changed her name from Katharine to Karima.
Her lawyer, Amato DeLuca gave a statement saying that Russell was shocked by recent events.
“She couldn’t believe it,” DeLuca said. “Imagine, just think of yourself. You got a brother or a father or somebody and you see their picture and it’s like wow, what’s going on. She was in complete shock.”
DeLuca also said Russell works long hours as a health care aide and suspected nothing. She was at work when she heard about his involvement four days after the bombing. DeLuca wouldn’t talk about the investigation or if his client has been questioned by the FBI.
Her family issued a statement saying: “In the aftermath of the Patriots’ Day horror we know that we never really knew Tamerlane Tsarnaev. Our hearts are sickened by the knowledge of the horror he has inflicted.”
Evidence of troubled moments in Tsarnaev’s past turned up in police records, which showed that his then-girlfriend called 911 in tears to report that he was beating her up.
Authorites are also looking closely at the six month trip Tsarnaev took last year to Russia and Chechnya, rebel groups then, carried out a number of violent attacks. Dagestan lost 115 police officers in almost 300 terror attacks. Investigators want to know whether he met with any of the notoriously fierce extremists there. Members of Congress, feel those six months last year were a turning point in Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s radicalization.
“When he came back he starting posting more radical jihadist YouTube videos and started becoming more of a fundamentalist Muslim,” Rep. Michael McCaul, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, said. “My concern is that he may have gone over there to visit his father and he received training and then became radicalized and then came back. Something happened in that period of time. He was not like that before,” McCaul said.
Neighbors in Cambridge said that Tsarnaev was a changed man, swearing off tobacco and alcohol, linking to extremist jihadist videos, and saying “I don’t have any American friends. I don’t understand them.” One neighbor said he expressed anger about America and Christianity.
“So with the Bible he believed that it was a cheap copy off the Koran and that it was used as an excuse for many wars fought by America to invade countries and take land away,” said Elbrecht Ammon. “He mentioned how America is a colonial power and wants to take as much land as possible and most casualties are innocent people shot down by American soldiers.”
The mother of the two brothers, Zubeidat Tsarnaev, told ABC News today from Russia that Tamerlan was always the leader of her two boys, and that after the bombing he called her to say, “Everything is okay, thanks to Allah.”
Tamerlan Tsarnaev and Dhzokhar Tsarnaev when they were young boys. as they posed with their two sisters.
April 22, 2013, Makhachkala, DAGESTAN
The aunt and uncle of Boston bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev say they saw no signs he was becoming radicalized during a visit to his old home in Dagestan last year.
“There was no feeling that he could be,” his aunt Patemat Sulemanova said. “It’s not possible.”
His aunt says he stayed partly to train and compete as a boxer. He had been a boxer in the United States, but the aunt said he gave it up in Dagestan after having trouble finding a coach he liked and concluding that the sport of hitting another person was against Islam.
“He he did not tell me anything [about extremism],” the uncle, Muhammed Haji Sulemanov, said.
They said he prayed at the central mosque in this city during his stay and advised his aunt on how to pray. The aunt and uncle, he is the suspect’s mother’s brother, describe themselves as devout Muslims but denied they fought with Tamerlan over interpretations of Islam.
“We were debating with him,” she said. “But not fighting.”
The aunt said during his visit Tamerlan made at least three trips to Chechnya, also home to an Islamist uprising, to visit relatives. He chose to fly home from the Chechen capital of Grozny instead of from the airport in Dagestan, though she did not say why.
One family member said Tsarnaev’s father is a “traditional Muslim” who eschews extremism. He couldn’t imagine his son would do such a thing.
The uncle said he is praying for Dzhokhar to recover from the wounds he sustained Friday.
“So he can tell us what really happened,” he said.
Tamerlan alarm bells among his family a year ago during a trip here to visit relatives. According to a family member, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, a devout Muslim, was kicked out of his uncle’s house because of his increasingly extremist views on religion.
Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, and his brother Dzhokhar, 19, are believed to have placed bombs at the Boston Marathon, killing three and wounding 170. Tamerlan was killed in a shootout with police early Friday and Dzhokhar was badly wounded and captured by police Friday night.
The FBI, looked into Tamerlan Tsarnaev in 2011 in a statement given, they revealed some details of the investigation.
“The request stated that it was based on information that he was a follower of radical Islam and a strong believer, and that he had changed drastically since 2010 as he prepared to leave the United States for travel to the country’s region to join unspecified underground groups,” the FBI statement said. In response to the request the bureau combed through its databases and interviewed the man and members of his family, but did not find any evidence he was tied to terror groups.
In days to come, more and more of this family background will surface, and any negative information that may be revealed about this family, will only inflame more Americans. In all fairness, the two suspects’ families shouldn’t be held responsible for something a member of their family has done. No matter how heinous the crime may be. The world reality is that all families have secrets and we are not perfect. There will be things revealed, that we may not like, but we must be unbiased and not judge them based on what someone else has done. We are a country of “freedom” and “fairness” and all Americans should display those principles.
