Three articles from WSJ
Boston Marathon Bombings: Turn to Religion Split Bomb Suspects Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's Home
After last week's Boston Marathon bombings, Zubeidat Tsarnaeva phoned her son Tamerlan in Massachusetts to make sure he was safe.
"Mama, why are you worrying?" Tamerlan replied from Boston, laughing.
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Czarnecki/Zuma Press
Reporters stand outside the Islamic Society of Boston center in Cambridge, Mass., a mosque Tamerlan Tsarnaev sometimes attended.
Days later, it was the son who phoned his mother. The two, in recent years, had shared a powerful transformation to a more intense brand of Islam.
A turn toward radical Islam by Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the Boston Marathon bombing suspect killed by police, forced a split in the family and shattered his relationship with his parents. Jennifer Smith and Alan Cullison explain. Photo: AP Images.
"The police, they have started shooting at us, they are chasing us," Mrs. Tsarnaeva says Tamerlan told her. "Mama, I love you." Then the phone went silent.
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Soon, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26 years old and a prime suspect in the bloody marathon bombings, was dead. Within hours, his younger brother and alleged accomplice, 19-year-old Dzhokhar, was severely wounded but in custody after a police manhunt found him hiding under a tarp in a boat called the Slipaway II in Watertown, Mass.
No motive has yet emerged for the brothers' alleged actions. As of late Sunday, officials still couldn't interrogate Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who was drifting in and out of consciousness at Boston's Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.
Law-enforcement officials trying to understand what happened in Boston are looking into whether Tamerlan Tsarnaev had taken a turn toward radical Islam. Among the things they are examining: a six-month trip he took last year to Dagestan, a republic in Russia's south, bordering Chechnya.
A close examination of the Tsarnaev family shows that, over the past five years or so, the personal lives of the family members slipped into turmoil, according to interviews with the parents, relatives and friends. The upheaval in the household was driven, at least in part, by a growing interest in religion by both Tamerlan and his mother.
Once known as a quiet teenager who aspired to be a boxer, Tamerlan Tsarnaev delved deeply into religion in recent years at the urging of his mother, who feared he was slipping into a life of marijuana, girls and alcohol. Tamerlan quit drinking and smoking, gave up boxing because he thought it was in opposition to his religion, and began pushing the rest of his family to pursue stricter ways, his mother recalled.
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Dominick Reuter for The Wall Street Journal
Tamerlan Tsarnaev was known to visit Al Bara Market and other Cambridge locations prior to his alleged involvement in the Boston Marathon bombing.
"You know how Islam has changed me," his mother, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal in Makhachkala, Dagestan, says he told her.
The changes drove a wedge through the Tsarnaev home at 410 Norfolk St., in Cambridge, Mass. Tamerlan persuaded his mother to cover herself up, which she says at one point distressed her husband, Anzor. "He said, 'You are being crazy, covering yourselves,'" she recalled her husband saying. She said that she told him, "This is what Islamic men should want. This is what I am supposed to do."
The parents' marriage broke up about two years ago. The father—a former boxer himself who was distraught when Tamerlan gave up the sport—has since moved to Dagestan after falling ill. Both parents believe that their sons are being framed for the Boston attack.
Over the past two years, Tamerlan became more confrontational about his religion, engaging in arguments with other worshipers at a Cambridge mosque he sometimes attended, according to a mosque spokesman and worshipers there.
His growing religious interest coincided with a rocky period in his life during which his boxing career stalled, he drifted in and out of community-college courses, he was charged with assault by a girlfriend who said he slapped her, and a friend of his was murdered.
The challenges in the U.S. were hard on the family, which comes from a centuries-old, patriarchal Caucasian tradition of mountain warriors that has often been at odds with Slavic Russian society. "It was hard because you realize that you used to be somebody there, but here, you're a nobody," said Maret Tsarnaeva, the brothers' aunt. "As Chechens, we always had to work hard to prove ourselves, no matter where we were."
Today, both Mr. and Mrs. Tsarnaev are in Dagestan, picking up the pieces from a family drama that has spanned three countries, nearly three decades and the birth of four children.
Back in the 1940s, Anzor Tsarnaev's parents were deported to Kyrgyzstan from their native Chechnya after Josef Stalin's regime accused the Caucasian Muslim ethnic group of being Nazi collaborators. Anzor was born and raised in Tokmok, a city not far from the capital of Bishkek. He was one of 10 siblings, many of whom went on to become lawyers.
He met his wife, Zubeidat, in Elista, the provincial capital of the Kalmykia region, where they were both students. Zubeidat, an ethnic Avar, came from Dagestan.
Though Tamerlan was born in Kalmykia, now part of Russia, the family blossomed after settling back in Kyrgyzstan, growing to include two daughters, Ailina and Bella, and Dzhokhar. Mr. Tsarnaev landed a job in the prosecutor's office in Bishkek.
"For a Chechen to get a job in the Kyrgyz government, he had a chance to make it," his sister, Maret, said in an interview at her home in the Toronto suburbs.
Nadezhda Nazarenko, who lived in the same building as the Tsarnaevs in Tokmok, recalled how Mr. Tsarnaev departed for work each morning and Mrs. Tsarnaeva dressed her kids tight and warm for the winter. "Even before they came here, there had been talk about how they were preparing to make it to America," said Ms. Nazarenko, a 64-year-old pensioner. "It was his dream—the father's."
According to his sister, Anzor was fired from his job in Bishkek shortly after war broke out in Chechnya in 1999, the second time the Kremlin tried to quell a separatist insurgency there since the collapse of the Soviet Union. He started working as a mechanic. "He had to feed his family," his sister said, suggesting that he was fired due to discrimination against Chechens that accompanied the war. "He fled only because of this persecution," she said.
The family first moved to Makhachkala, the capital of Dagestan, before crossing the Atlantic to the U.S. about 10 years ago. By then, Anzor already had his sister in Canada and a brother in the U.S.
The family settled in a working-class apartment on the suburban-Boston border of Somerville and Cambridge. And the difficulty of making it in America as immigrants with meager money and little English set in. Anzor again worked as a mechanic, at times fixing cars on the street for $10 an hour. Zubeidat went to cosmetology school and started giving facials at a suburban Boston spa.
Tamerlan threw himself into boxing. He became one of the top amateur boxers in the U.S., according to Douglas Yoffe, coach of the Harvard Boxing Club. Tamerlan would fight as his father coached.
The young boxer possessed a cool, polished fighting style but came off as "cocky" and "sort of arrogant," Mr. Yoffe said. "He seemed almost disdainful of all these other fighters," he said.
Kendrick Ball, owner of Camp Get Right Boxing Gym in Worcester, Mass., remembers Tamerlan for his look. "He was dressed like he was about to walk on the runway," Mr. Ball said. The first time he met Tamerlan, in 2010, "He had on a trench coat and a pair of tight jeans, silver shoes, a white shirt unbuttoned halfway down and hair pushed back like John Travolta."
Tamerlan qualified for the 2009 National Golden Gloves tournament after winning the New England regional competitions, but he lost in the first round. He won the New England regional title again in 2010 but didn't fight in the national competition. It was unclear why.
Dominick Reuter for The Wall Street Journal
Cambridge Rindge & Latin School
In high school at Cambridge Rindge & Latin School, Tamerlan was reserved. He haunted the library and rarely skipped class, heading to the gym most days after school to practice boxing, said his classmate, Luis Vasquez.
He and his brother liked to throw parties. A neighbor, Rinat Harel, said that about five years ago the brothers used to host loud gatherings, grilling and drinking in a shared courtyard until midnight or later.
Then Tamerlan hit headwinds. His ambitions to be a champion boxer stalled. Community college proved costly, and he didn't have a job. He also had problems in his love life that included a frantic 911 call that a woman, identified as his girlfriend, made in July 2009.
"Yes, I slapped her," Tamerlan told police in front of his home, according to the police report. The domestic-abuse case was dismissed at a jury trial in 2010.
He later married a different woman, Katherine Russell, a former Suffolk University student from North Kingstown, R.I., and she is the mother of his child. Her family released a statement saying they now realize they never knew the real Tamerlan Tsarnaev and declined interview requests. Late Sunday, the family's attorney in a statement said Ms. Russell didn't notice any troubling changes in Tamerlan in the months and years before the attack.
Meanwhile a friend of Tamerlan's, Brendan Mess, was murdered in the Boston-area city of Waltham on Sept. 11, 2011, in a case that has remained unresolved. And Tamerlan's father grew increasingly ill.
During this turmoil, his mother encouraged him to turn to Islam. "I told Tamerlan that we are Muslim, and we are not practicing our religion, and how can we call ourselves Muslims?" Mrs. Tsarnaeva said. "And that's how Tamerlan started reading about Islam, and he started praying, and he got more and more and more into his religion."
Relatives and friends say they saw a shift in the young man. Neighbors noticed that the parties stopped. "I'm telling you, something turned," said Mr. Vasquez. "And it was dramatic."
Tamerlan wasn't the only Tsarnaev who was changing. His mother grew more religious alongside him. She quit her job at the spa and started doing facials in her home, saying she didn't want to work on men. "I started reading and started learning, I started reading with my Tamerlan," Mrs. Tsarnaeva said.
Her sister-in-law, Maret, said she was startled by the transformation. She recalled having a Skype conversation with Anzor, while he was in Makhachkala, and spotting Zubeidat in the background covered in a veil. "We're not used to seeing her like that because she used to wear high heels and a low dress," Maret said.
The changes grated on Anzor. He was particularly frustrated by Tamerlan's decision around 2011 to quit boxing.
Anzor Tsarnaev said he was "outraged" by his son's decision to drop boxing. He said Tamerlan told him that a Muslim must not punch another man in the face.
Anzor said he grew up in Soviet times, when it was taken for granted that Muslims didn't have to follow such strict rules. "I told him I trained him all his life so that he could accomplish something, so that he could be a champion at something," Anzor said. "He discarded it."
He said the tensions over Tamerlan's strict adherence to religion, along with his own health problems, weighed on him and his marriage. He became "very depressed," he said. Eventually, Anzor left his wife, and left the U.S.
Dzhokhar, meanwhile, remained quiet and happy-go-lucky through high school. "He was just this scrawny little kid who was always giggling and happy," said Juliette Terry, 20, who met Dzhokhar in elementary school and was part of a group of friends with whom he attended prom. "I can't remember him saying a mean word in his life."
Dzhokhar moved on to the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth. For orientation, in 2011, he participated in the summer reading program and commented in a group discussion blog about the "West Memphis Three," the well-known case of men convicted of murder as teens only to be later released due to new evidence.
"In this case it would have been hard to protect or defend these boys if the whole town exclaimed in happiness at his arrest," Dzhokhar wrote. "Also, to go against the authorities is not the easiest thing to do. Don't get me wrong though, I am appalled at the situation but I think the town was scared and desperate to blame someone."
There are some signs he grew more reserved in college. One freshman-year professor expressed surprise at hearing Dzhokhar was active in high school, because "he was definitely quiet, the 'pulling teeth' kind." Lauryn Mort, 19, who worked with Dzhokhar on an English project last spring, said he was smart but seemed to care little about class work. He often showed up late to class, she said.
Others noted the domineering affect his older brother seemed to have. Gilberto Junior, owner of Junior Auto Body in Somerville, Mass., who regularly worked on the brothers' cars, said Dzhokhar was sociable when he came in by himself but silent with his brother.
Around this time, Tamerlan grew more confrontational in his religious beliefs. Ruslan Tsarni, the boys' uncle, said he realized in 2009 that Tamerlan had changed and was spewing "this radical crap." People who knew him say Tamerlan would express outrage when he perceived a religious slight and was critical of Muslim immigrants' efforts to assimilate in the U.S.
In one incident last November, Tamerlan confronted a shopkeeper at a Middle Eastern grocery store in Cambridge, near a mosque where he sometimes prayed, after seeing a sign there advertising Thanksgiving turkeys.
"Brother, why did you put up this sign?" the shopkeeper, Abdou Razak, recalled him asking angrily. "This is kuffar"—an Arabic reference to non-Muslims—"that's not right!"
At Friday prayers that month, Tamerlan stood up and challenged a sermon in which the speaker said that, just like "we all celebrate the birthday of the Prophet, we can also celebrate July 4 and Thanksgiving," according to Yusufi Vali, a mosque spokesman. Mr. Vali said Tamerlan stated that he "took offense to celebrating anything," be it the Prophet's birthday (which not all Muslims celebrate) or American holidays.
Tamerlan also protested at Friday prayers in January, around the Martin Luther King Day holiday, when a speaker compared the civil-rights leader with the Prophet Muhammad, Mr. Vali said. Tamerlan interrupted the sermon and called the speaker a hypocrite, while some in the congregation shouted back, "You're the hypocrite!" Mr. Vali said.
That was Tamerlan's last outburst at the mosque, according to Mr. Vali. He said a respected member of the community told Tamerlan afterward, "If this happens again, you're out."
Earlier, Tamerlan had attracted the attention of the FBI. His father said the officers visited one-and-a-half years ago to discuss Tamerlan's interests and had tea in his third-floor apartment. "They told me they were watching everything—what we look at on the computers, what we talked about on the phone," he said. "I said that's fine. That's what they should be doing."
The boys' mother, Mrs. Tsarnaeva, said Tamerlan was defiant in his meetings with FBI officials. "I am in a country that gives me the right to read whatever I want and watch whatever I want,'" Mrs. Tsarnaeva recalled her son saying. "He was even trying to get the FBI [agent] to convert to Islam."
Mrs. Tsarnaeva was in Dagestan as the manhunt for her children unfolded in Boston. She received a text message from her daughter Bella telling her to turn on the TV.
"I looked for the remote and couldn't find it," Mrs. Tsarnaeva said. Finally, her daughter phoned, she said, and told her: "Mama, I'm sorry to tell you this. I'm sorry to tell you that Tamerlan is killed."
—Jennifer Smith, Josh Dawsey, Alison Fox, Will James, Jacob Gershman, Dionne Searcey, Lisa Fleisher, Jennifer Levitz, Jon Kamp, Pervaiz Shallwani, Stu Woo, Danny Gold, Gary Fields and Sara Germano contributed to this article.
Write to Alan Cullison at alan.cullison@wsj.com, Paul Sonne at paul.sonne@wsj.com and Anton Troianovski at anton.troianovski@wsj.com
April 21, 2013, 5:32 p.m. ET
Make No Mistake, It Was Jihad
Let's hope the administration gets over its reluctance to recognize attacks on the U.S. for what they are.
If your concern about the threat posed by the Tsarnaev brothers is limited to assuring that they will never be in a position to repeat their grisly acts, rest easy.
The elder, Tamerlan—apparently named for the 14th-century Muslim conqueror famous for building pyramids of his victims' skulls to commemorate his triumphs over infidels—is dead. The younger, Dzhokhar, will stand trial when his wounds heal, in a proceeding where the most likely uncertainty will be the penalty. No doubt there will be some legal swordplay over his interrogation by the FBI's High-Value Interrogation Group without receiving Miranda warnings. But the only downside for the government in that duel is that his statements may not be used against him at trial. This is not much of a risk when you consider the other available evidence, including photo images of him at the scene of the bombings and his own reported confession to the victim whose car he helped hijack during last week's terror in Boston.
But if your concern is over the larger threat that inheres in who the Tsarnaev brothers were and are, what they did, and what they represent, then worry—a lot.
For starters, you can worry about how the High-Value Interrogation Group, or HIG, will do its work. That unit was finally put in place by the FBI after so-called underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab tried to blow up the airplane in which he was traveling as it flew over Detroit on Christmas Day in 2009 and was advised of his Miranda rights. The CIA interrogation program that might have handled the interview had by then been dismantled by President Obama.
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In the White House Situation Room on April 19, President Obama meets with his national-security team, including FBI Director Robert Mueller to his immediate left.
At the behest of such Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated groups as the Council on American Islamic Relations and the Islamic Society of North America, and other self-proclaimed spokesmen for American Muslims, the FBI has bowdlerized its training materials to exclude references to militant Islamism. Does this delicacy infect the FBI's interrogation group as well?
Will we see another performance like the Army's after-action report following Maj. Nidal Hasan's rampage at Fort Hood in November 2009, preceded by his shout "allahu akhbar"—a report that spoke nothing of militant Islam but referred to the incident as "workplace violence"? If tone is set at the top, recall that the Army chief of staff at the time said the most tragic result of Fort Hood would be if it interfered with the Army's diversity program.
Presumably the investigation into the Boston terror attack will include inquiry into not only the immediate circumstances of the crimes but also who funded Tamerlan Tsarnaev's months-long sojourn abroad in 2012 and his comfortable life style. Did he have a support network? What training did he, and perhaps his younger brother, receive in the use of weapons? Where did the elder of the two learn to make the suicide vest he reportedly wore? The investigation should include as well a deep dive into Tamerlan's radicalization, the Islamist references in the brothers' social media communications, and the jihadist websites they visited.
Will the investigation probe as well the FBI's own questioning of Tamerlan two years ago at the behest of an unspecified foreign government, presumably Russia, over his involvement with jihadist websites and other activities? Tamerlan Tsarnaev is the fifth person since 9/11 who has participated in terror attacks after questioning by the FBI. He was preceded by Nidal Hasan; drone casualty Anwar al Awlaki; Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad (born Carlos Leon Bledsoe), who murdered an Army recruit in Little Rock in June 2009; and David Coleman Headley, who provided intelligence to the perpetrators of the Mumbai massacre in 2008. That doesn't count Abdulmutallab, who was the subject of warnings to the CIA that he was a potential terrorist.
If the intelligence yielded by the FBI's investigation is of value, will that value be compromised when this trial is held, as it almost certainly will be, in a civilian court? Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's lawyers, as they have every right to do, will seek to discover that intelligence and use it to fashion a case in mitigation if nothing else, to show that his late brother was the dominant conspirator who had access to resources and people.
There is also cause for concern in that this was obviously a suicide operation—not in the direct way of a bomber who kills all his victims and himself at the same time by blowing himself up, but in the way of someone who conducts a spree, holding the stage for as long as possible, before he is cut down in a blaze of what he believes is glory. Here, think Mumbai.
Until now, it has been widely accepted in law-enforcement circles that such an attack in the U.S. was less likely because of the difficulty that organizers would have in marshaling the spiritual support to keep the would-be suicide focused on the task. That analysis went out the window when the Tsarnaevs followed up the bombing of the marathon by murdering a police officer in his car—an act certain to precipitate the violent confrontation that followed.
It has been apparent that with al Qaeda unable to mount elaborate attacks like the one it carried out on 9/11, other Islamists have stepped in with smaller and less intricate crimes, but crimes that are nonetheless meant to send a terrorist message. These include Faisal Shahzad, who failed to detonate a device in Times Square in 2010, and would-be subway bomber Najibullah Zazi and his confederates.
Is this, as former CIA Director Michael Hayden put it, the new normal?
There is also cause for concern in the president's reluctance, soon after the Boston bombing, even to use the "t" word—terrorism—and in his vague musing on Friday about some unspecified agenda of the perpetrators, when by then there was no mystery: the agenda was jihad.
For five years we have heard, principally from those who wield executive power, of a claimed need to make fundamental changes in this country, to change the world's—particularly the Muslim world's—perception of us, to press "reset" buttons. We have heard not a word from those sources suggesting any need to understand and confront a totalitarian ideology that has existed since at least the founding of the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1920s.
The ideology has regarded the United States as its principal adversary since the late 1940s, when a Brotherhood principal, Sayid Qutb, visited this country and was aghast at what he saw as its decadence. The first World Trade Center bombing, in 1993, al Qaeda attacks on American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, on the USS Cole in 2000, the 9/11 attacks, and those in the dozen years since—all were fueled by Islamist hatred for the U.S. and its values.
There are Muslim organizations in this country, such as the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, headed by Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, that speak out bravely against that totalitarian ideology. They receive no shout-out at presidential speeches; no outreach is extended to them.
One of the Tsarnaev brothers is dead; the other might as well be. But if that is the limit of our concern, there will be others.
Mr. Mukasey served as attorney general of the United States from 2007 to 2009 and as a U.S. district judge for the Southern District of New York from 1988 to 2006.
A version of this article appeared April 22, 2013, on page A15 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Make No Mistake, It Was Jihad
The Brothers Tsarnaev
The terrorist suspects next door.
Arizona Sen. John McCain on the events surrounding the Boston Marathon bombings. Photo: Getty Images
One consoling thought is the admirable behavior of the citizens of greater Boston and its law enforcers. The point may seem banal, but it's no small matter that the public largely heeded the government's orders to stay off the streets and take the day off so police could track down the younger brother, 19-year-old Dzhokhar, who was captured Friday night after a day-long manhunt.
Bostonians have endured enormous disruption this week, but the city has shown a remarkable civility and calm throughout it all. Many lives were saved because of the rapid triage work by volunteers at the bomb scene. Bloomberg News reports that one of the marathon bombing's victims also helped the FBI identify a suspect after he awoke from surgery at the hospital. The suspect had dropped a bag at Jeff Bauman's feet and looked him in the eye minutes before it exploded. Mr. Bauman lost both legs below the knee but got his man.
As for the brothers, we will learn more about their motives, their training and whether they acted alone or as part of a network. What we have already learned is that they are immigrants from Chechnya, of the Muslim faith, and that 26-year old Tamerlan was uncomfortable in American society despite having lived here for about a decade.
The Associated Press reported that he was quoted in a Boston University student magazine in 2010 as saying, "I don't have a single American friend. I don't understand them." Mother Jones reported that a video attributed to a Tamerlan Tsarnaev extolled an extremist religious prophecy associated with al Qaeda. None of this is definitive but it might be illustrative.
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Reuters
Tamerlan Tsarnaev, left, 26, and his brother Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19
If such alienation turned to jihad, it would not be the first time. The radicalization of young Muslims in the West, in particular children of the well-off, is by now a familiar story. The London bombers of 2005 were middle-class Pakistani immigrants from Birmingham. Faisal Shahzad, the failed Times Square bomber, was a naturalized citizen from Pakistan.
After the London bombings, many Americans took comfort in the belief that immigrants to the U.S. are better assimilated than they are in Europe. But that may be more conceit than fact, at least in regard to some young men. "My Son the Fanatic" is a novella by Hanif Kureishi that speaks to the difficulties of acculturation of second-generation Muslims. The recent Pulitzer Prize-winning play, "Disgraced," covers related ground.
Mitchell Silber and Arvin Bhatt explained how this can evolve into a threat in an instructive paper for the New York Police Department in 2007, "Radicalization in the West: The Homegrown Threat." The intelligence analysts looked at several cases here and abroad and described the process by which otherwise "unremarkable" men leading regular lives become jihadists.
"Muslims in the U.S. are more resistant, but not immune to the radical message," they wrote. "Despite the economic opportunities in the United States, the powerful gravitational pull of individuals' religious roots and identity sometimes supersedes the assimilating nature of American society which includes pursuit of a professional career, financial stability and material comforts." The Tsarnaev brothers may be an example.
Some will use this threat as an argument against immigration, but that would punish everyone for the sins of a few. The "homegrown" radical threat is really an argument for vigilance, especially within communities prone to producing terrorists.
This means surveilling foreign student groups in the U.S., certain immigrant communities that have produced jihadists, and, yes, even mosques and other Muslim venues. The key is to be familiar enough with these communities, to know and be trusted enough by their leaders, so those man and women will alert law enforcers when someone appears to have become radicalized.
This offends some civil libertarians, and the Associated Press excoriated the NYPD for the practice in a series of stories in 2011. In the wake of Boston, this looks notably misguided. New York's police say they've kept at it, under appropriate legal safeguards, and we hope they will continue.
The U.S. government watches right-wing extremist groups because we know they are dangerous. The police shouldn't refrain from doing the same to Muslim or immigrant groups merely because that is deemed less politically correct. As the week's events in Boston show, the costs of doing otherwise are too high.
A version of this article appeared April 20, 2013, on page A14 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The Brothers Tsarnaev.
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