Published on May 28, 2010
On May 22nd, Massachusetts Governor Patrick embraced the radical leadership of the Muslim American Society (MAS), including Imam Abdullah Faarooq who told followers they must "pick up the gun and the sword" in response to the arrests of local Islamic extremist Aafia Siddiqui and terror suspect Tarek Mehanna. Full sermon by Imam Faaruuq is available here:
http://www.mefeedia.com/watch/29378193
The Federal Bureau of Investigation released this image of Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev.
Ruslan Tsarni, the uncle of the two Boston Marathon bombing suspects, spoke to reporters on FridayApril 19, 2013
Dragnet Shuts Boston; One Suspect Is Slain but Second Man Is on Loose
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE and MICHAEL COOPER
BOSTON — One of the suspects in the Boston Marathon bombings was killed early Friday morning after leading the police on a wild chase after the fatal shooting of a campus police officer, while the other was sought in an immense manhunt that shut down large parts of the area. Gov. Deval Patrick of Massachusetts said residents of Boston and its neighboring communities should “stay indoors, with their doors locked.”
The two suspects were identified by law enforcement officials as brothers. The surviving suspect was identified as Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev, 19, of Cambridge, Mass., a law enforcement official said. The one who was killed was identified as his brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26. The authorities were investigating whether the dead man had a homemade bomb strapped to his body when he was killed, two law enforcement officials said.
The manhunt sent the Boston region into the grip of a security emergency, as hundreds of police officers conducted a wide search and all public transit services were suspended.
Col. Timothy P. Alben of the Massachusetts State Police said investigators believed that the two men were responsible for the death of a Massachusetts Institute of Technology police officer and the shooting of an officer with the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, the region’s transit authority. “We believe these are the same individuals that were responsible for the bombing on Monday at the Boston Marathon,” he said.
One law enforcement official said Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was wounded, and two other officials said the authorities had tracked him at some point during the manhunt by his blood trail.
The uncle of the men, Ruslan Tsarni, who lives in Montgomery Village, Md., told reporters that he was ashamed of their actions, bitterly calling them “losers” and sternly denouncing the bombings. And he urged the surviving brother to turn himself into the authorities.
“I say Dzhokhar, if you’re alive, turn yourself in and ask for forgiveness,” said Mr. Tsarni, who said that his family had been estranged from theirs, and that their father, who recently moved back to Russia, had worked “fixing cars” in America.
Mr. Tsarni said that the family had moved to Cambridge in 2003 from Kyrgyzstan, where Tamerlan Tsarnaev was born. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was born in Dagestan, he said. Mr. Tsarni said that the last time he saw his nephews was December 2005.
Officials said that the two men were of Chechen origin. Chechnya, a long-disputed, predominantly Muslim territory in southern Russia sought independence after the collapse of the Soviet Union and then fought two bloody wars with the authorities in Moscow. Russian assaults on Chechnya were brutal and killed tens of thousands of civilians, as terrorist groups from the region staged attacks in central Russia. In recent years, separatist militant groups have gone underground, and surviving leaders have embraced fundamentalist Islam.
The family lived briefly in Makhachkala, the capital of the Dagestan region, near Chechnya, before moving to the United States, said a school administrator there. Irina V. Bandurina, secretary to the director of School No. 1, said the Tsarnaev family left Dagestan for the United States in 2002 after living there for about a year. She said the family — parents, two boys and two girls — had lived in the Central Asian nation of Kyrgyzstan previously.
The brothers have substantial presences on social media. On Vkontakte, Russia’s most popular social media platform, the younger brother, Dzhokhar, describes his worldview as “Islam” and, asked to identify “the main thing in life,” answers “career and money.” He lists a series of affinity groups relating to Chechnya, and lists a verse from the Koran, “Do good, because Allah loves those who do good.”
One former schoolmate of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School in Massachusetts described him as “very sweet,” adding, “I never heard anyone say a bad word about him.” Another, Meron Woldemariam, 17, the manager of the school volleyball team that Mr. Tsarnaev had played for, said that he had left the team in the middle of the season to wrestle. She described him as normal — sociable, friendly and fun to talk to. He was a senior when she was a freshman.
The older brother left a record on YouTube of his favorite clips, which included Russian rap videos, as well as testimonial from a young ethnic Russian man titled “How I accepted Islam and became a Shiite,” and a clip “Seven Steps to Successful Prayer.”
Alvi Karimov, the spokesman for Ramzan A. Kadyrov, leader of Chechnya, said the Tsarnaev brothers had not lived in Chechnya for many years. He told the Interfax news service that, according to preliminary information, the family “moved to a different region of the Russian Federation from Chechnya many years ago.” He continued, “Then the family lived for a long time in Kazakhstan, and from there moved to the United States, where the members of the family received residency permits.”
“In such a way, the figures who are being spoken about did not live in Chechnya at a mature age, and if they became ‘bad guys,’ then this is a question that should be put to the people who raised them,” he said.
Early Friday, a virtual army of heavily armed law enforcement officers was going through houses in Watertown, outside of Boston, one by one in a search for the second suspect. The police had blocked off a 20-block residential area and urged residents emphatically to stay inside their homes and not answer their doors.
The Boston police commissioner, Edward Davis, said, “We believe this to be a man who’s come here to kill people, and we need to get him in custody.”
In Washington, as well as in the Boston area, law enforcement and counterterrorism officials were scrambling to determine whether the two brothers had any accomplices still at large and whether they had any connections to foreign or domestic terrorist organizations.
Intelligence analysts were poring over the brothers’ e-mails, cellphone records and postings on Facebook and other social media for clues. Authorities have also started interviewing family members, friends and other associates for information about the men, and any possible ties to extremist groups or causes, officials said.
Federal officials are also investigating any travel by the brothers outside the United States, perhaps to receive training. “They will take these guys’ lives apart,” said one senior retired law enforcement official.
The older brother apparently traveled to Turkey in 2003. The Turkish interior minister, Muammer Guler, confirmed reports that he had arrived there on July 9, 2003, with three others carrying the same surname, and left the country 10 days later from Ankara, the capital, the semiofficial Anatolian News Agency reported.
“It is estimated that they were a family,” Mr. Guler said. “We established that they had no connection with Turkey.”
There was no information on Tsarnaevs’ next destination after Ankara.
As the manhunt grew in intensity, law enforcement officials throughout New England tried to chase down leads.
The authorities in Boston notified transit police officials that there was a possibility the surviving suspect had boarded the last Amtrak train from Boston bound for New York City in the early morning on Friday, according to an official with knowledge of the matter.
The New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority Police, which has authority over the tracks in New York and Connecticut, along with the police from Norwalk, Ct., stopped that train between the East Norwalk and Westport, Ct., stations; the Norwalk Police Department’s SWAT team swept the train, but did not find the suspect, the official said. While the authorities believe it was unlikely he was aboard, they were reviewing video surveillance footage from the stations in Providence, New Haven and New London to be sure that the suspect did not get off before the train was stopped and searched.
At least one Metro North train, operated by the M.T.A. on the same tracks over which Amtrak travels, was also stopped by the Westport Police for reasons that were unclear, the official said.
And the Connecticut State Police announced that it had received information suggesting that the suspect could be operating a gray Honda CRV, with a Massachusetts registration number 316 ES9. “Connecticut troopers are posted strategically in our state and continue to communicate with Massachusetts authorities,” the state police said in a statement.
In Boston, where gunfire ricocheted around a tranquil neighborhood, residents were later told to go into their basements and stay away from windows.
The pursuit began after 10 p.m. Thursday when two men robbed a convenience store in Cambridge. A security camera caught a man identified as one of the suspects wearing a gray hooded shirt.
About 10:30 p.m., the police received reports that Sean Collier, a campus security officer at M.I.T., had been shot while he sat in his police cruiser. He was found with multiple gunshot wounds, according to a statement issued by the acting Middlesex district attorney, Michael Pelgro, Cambridge Police Commissioner Robert C. Haas and the M.I.T. police chief, John DiFava. The officer was taken to Massachusetts General Hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
A short time later, the police received reports of an armed carjacking of a Mercedes sport-utility vehicle by two males in the area of Third Street in Cambridge, the statement said. “The victim was carjacked at gunpoint by two males and was kept in the car with the suspects for approximately a half-hour,” the statement said. He was later released, uninjured, at a gas station on Memorial Drive in Cambridge.
The carjacking victim said the brothers told him they were responsible for the bombing of the Boston Marathon, a law enforcement official said.
The police immediately began to search for the vehicle and pursued it into Watertown. During the chase, “explosive devices were reportedly thrown from car by the suspects,” the statement said, and the suspects and police exchanged gunfire in the area of Dexter Avenue and Laurel Street.
During that exchange, a transit police officer was shot and critically wounded. The wounded transit police officer was identified as Richard H. Donohue, and he was taken to Mt. Auburn Hospital, where he was listed in critical condition Friday morning.
The officer had nearly bled to death from a gunshot wound to his right leg when he arrived at the hospital, said a person familiar with his treatment. The hospital’s trauma team gave him a blood transfusion and cardiopulmonary resuscitation, and got his blood pressure back up, but he was still on a ventilator, the person said.
A Watertown resident, Andrew Kitzenberg, 29, said he looked out his third-floor window to see two young men of slight build in jackets engaged in “constant gunfire” with police officers. A police S.U.V. “drove towards the shooters,” he said, and was shot at until it was severely damaged. It rolled out of control, Mr. Kitzenberg said, and crashed into two cars in his driveway.
The two shooters, he said, had a large, unwieldy bomb that he said looked “like a pressure cooker.”
“They lit it, still in the middle of the gunfire, and threw it,” he said. “But it went 20 yards at most.” It exploded, he said, and one man ran toward the gathered police officers. He was tackled, but it was not clear if he was shot, Mr. Kitzenberg said.
The explosions, said another resident, Loretta Kehayias, 65, “lit up the whole house.” She said, “I screamed. I’ve never seen anything like this, never, never, never.”
Meanwhile, Mr. Kitzenberg said the other man got back into the S.U.V., turned it toward officers and “put the pedal to the metal.” The car “went right through the cops, broke right through and continued west.”
The two men left “a few backpacks right by the car, and there is a bomb robot out there now,” he said.
During this exchange, an MBTA police officer was seriously wounded and taken to the hospital.
At the same time, Tamerlan Tsarnaev was critically injured with multiple gunshot wounds and taken to Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital in Boston, where he was pronounced dead at 1:35 a.m., officials said.
Jeff Bauman, the Boston Marathon spectator in a famous photograph, described the first suspect in the marathon bombings in great detail to F.B.I. agents on Tuesday night, his father, also named Jeff, said early Friday morning.
“He gave them a perfect description of everything — the hat, the glasses, the coat, everything,” Mr. Bauman, the father, said on Friday by phone, as he watched the manhunt play out on television.
On Wednesday night, after Jeff Bauman underwent a third surgery to fit his legs for prosthetics, he drew a picture of the suspect, his father said. Bloomberg first reported Thursday that the younger Jeff Bauman had identified one of the suspects.
Katharine Q. Seelye reported from Boston, and Michael Cooper from New York. Reporting was contributed by Richard A. Oppel Jr, Jess Bidgood, Serge F. Kovaleski, John Eligon and Timothy Rohan from Boston; William K. Rashbaum and Ravi Somaiya from New York; Eric Schmitt from Washington; Andrew Siddons from Montgomery Village, Md.; Sebnem Arsu from Istanbul and Ellen Barry from Moscow.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: April 19, 2013
An earlier version misspelled the name of a resident who described the police activity in Watertown, Mass. He is Andrew Kitzenberg, not Kitzenburg. An earlier version of this article also misstated where the suspects and police exchanged gunfire. It is Dexter Avenue, not Dexter Street.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/20/us/boston-marathon-bombings.html?ref=global-home&_r=0&pagewanted=print