Reuters
The body of Sean Collier, the M.I.T. officer killed in Boston, was carried into church for his funeral Tuesday.
NY TIMES
The portrait investigators have begun to piece together of the two brothers suspected of the Boston Marathon bombings suggests that they were motivated by extremist Islamic beliefs but were not acting with known terrorist groups — and that they may have learned to build bombs simply by logging onto the online English-language magazine of the Al Qaeda affiliate in Yemen, law enforcement officials said Tuesday.
The investigation into the bombings is still in its earliest stages, and federal authorities were still in the process of corroborating some of the admissions that law enforcement officials said were made by the surviving suspect in the attacks,Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19. But they said some of his statements suggested that the two brothers could represent the kind of emerging threat that federal authorities have long feared: angry and alienated young men, apparently self-trained and unaffiliated with any particular terrorist group, able to use the Internet to learn their lethal craft.
One law-enforcement official said that investigators were interested in learning whether Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s wife, Katherine Russell, knew anything about the bombings.
“At one point, we were looking very hard at her, but less so now,” the official said. “But we are still looking at her.”
Amid questions about whether the F.B.I. missed an opportunity to discover that one of the suspects in the Boston Marathon bombings may have become an extremist, law enforcement officials defended their actions on Monday, saying they had no legal basis to monitor him in the months leading up to the attack.
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The exchange between the F.B.I. and Russian authorities on Mr. Tsarnaev’s potential links to extremist groups has cast a spotlight on a counterterrorism relationship that has endured even as diplomatic relations between the countries have gone through ups and downs.
However, it also reflects what Daniel Benjamin, the State Department’s former top counterterrorism official, said on Monday was “a culture of wariness” between the two former cold war rivals. Even as the United States responds to Russian requests for details on potential extremists, Mr. Benjamin said, the authorities must be careful not to provide information that could “expose sources and methods or get us involved in an abuse of human rights that we couldn’t condone.”
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In Mr. Tsarnaev’s case, the Russian government expressed fear that he could be a risk “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 F.B.I. said in a statement.
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In Mr. Tsarnaev’s case, the Russian government expressed fear that he could be a risk “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 F.B.I. said in a statement.
The F.B.I. responded by checking government databases for any criminal records or immigration violations as well as activity on Web sites that promote extremist views and activities. The investigators found no derogatory information, officials said.
When they asked the Russians for more information to justify a search of Mr. Tsarnaev’s phone records, travel history and other more restricted information, they received no reply, a senior United States official said.
As a last resort, the F.B.I. sent two counterterrorism agents to interview Mr. Tsarnaev and members of his family. According to an F.B.I. statement, “The F.B.I. did not find any terrorism activity, domestic or foreign.”
After Mr. Tsarnaev’s visit to Dagestan and Chechnya, signs of alienation emerged. One month after he returned to the United States, a YouTube page that appeared to belong to him was created and featured jihadist videos.
After Mr. Tsarnaev’s visit to Dagestan and Chechnya, signs of alienation emerged. One month after he returned to the United States, a YouTube page that appeared to belong to him was created and featured jihadist videos.
Posting such videos alone, without overt threats of violence, should not necessarily sound alarms, some counterterrorism specialists said Monday.
“I tend to view this stuff as certainly interesting, and evincing some degree of extreme beliefs, but probably not exactly a flashing warning sign,” said Evan F. Kohlmann, a terrorism analyst with the consulting company Flashpoint Global Partners.
Anecdotes suggest that Mr. Tsarnaev became more religious in the last several years and may have embraced more conservative Islamic ideas.
On Monday, a spokesman for the Islamic Society of Boston, a Cambridge mosque, said Mr. Tsarnaev disrupted a talk there in January, insulting the speaker and accusing him of deviating from Islam by comparing the Prophet Muhammad to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. It was the second time he had disrupted an event at the mosque because he felt that its religious message was too liberal, said the spokesman, Yusufi Vali, according to a report in The Boston Globe.
[April 25, 2013: The suspects were planning to drive to Manhattan and detonate their remaining explosives in Times Square, New York City officials said Thursday.
They said Dzhokhar Tsarnaev told investigators from his hospital bed that he and his older brother hatched the New York plan on April 18, hours before their deadly encounter with law enforcement officers.
[April 25, 2013: The suspects were planning to drive to Manhattan and detonate their remaining explosives in Times Square, New York City officials said Thursday.
They said Dzhokhar Tsarnaev told investigators from his hospital bed that he and his older brother hatched the New York plan on April 18, hours before their deadly encounter with law enforcement officers.