It's over. Nearly 22 hours after the shooting of an MIT police officer led authorities on a wild manhunt for the missing alleged Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, he has been taken alive. The suspect was found in a boat in Watertown, Massachusetts, at around 7:30 Friday evening just outside the area where the police had been conducting door-to-door searches all day, [April 24, 2013: But Commissioner Davis, of the Boston police, said this week that the boat had been inside the perimeter.
“It was an area that should have been checked,” he said. “We are not sure how long he was in the boat.] He was taken into custody about 8:45 p.m. to applause by police officers and bystanders at the scene. According to reports, Tsarnaev is being transported to Mount Auburn Hospital. "We got him," Boston Mayor Tom Menino announced. Police detailed the capture at a press conference soon after, saying they identified Tsarnaev with a sensor from a helicopter overhead
“A man had gone out of his house after being inside the house all day, abiding by our request to stay inside,” Mr. Davis said, referring to the advice officials gave to residents to remain behind locked doors. “He walked outside and saw blood on a boat in the backyard. He then opened the tarp on the top of the boat, and he looked in and saw a man covered with blood. He retreated and called us.”
“Over the course of the next hour or so we exchanged gunfire with the suspect, who was inside the boat, and ultimately the hostage rescue team of the F.B.I. made an entry into the boat and removed the suspect, who was still alive,” Mr. Davis said. He said the suspect was in “serious condition” and had apparently been wounded in the gunfight that left his brother dead.
[April 24,2013: Although police feared he was heavily armed, Dzhokhar had no firearms when he came under a barrage of police gunfire, according to multiple federal law enforcement officials.
Authorities said they were desperate to capture Dzhokhar Tsarnaev so he could be questioned. The FBI, however, declined to discuss what triggered the gunfire. Other law enforcement officials said the shooting may have been prompted by the chaos of the moment and some action that led the officers present to believe Tsarnaev had fired a weapon or was about to detonate explosives.
Law enforcement officials described the 30 minutes before the arrest of Tsarnaev as chaotic. One characterized it as “the fog of war” and said that in a highly charged atmosphere, one accidental shot could have caused what police call “contagious fire.”
Officers from several agencies gathered around the Watertown house as darkness fell. The FBI was in charge of the scene, but there also were officers from the Massachusetts State Police, local police and transit police. "They probably didn’t know whether he had a gun,... They couldn’t assume that he did not have a gun and more explosives.” ]
A federal law enforcement official said he would not be read his Miranda rights, because the authorities would be invoking the public safety exception in order to question him extensively about other potential explosive devices or accomplices and to try to gain intelligence. [April 24,2013: Although police feared he was heavily armed, Dzhokhar had no firearms when he came under a barrage of police gunfire, according to multiple federal law enforcement officials.
Authorities said they were desperate to capture Dzhokhar Tsarnaev so he could be questioned. The FBI, however, declined to discuss what triggered the gunfire. Other law enforcement officials said the shooting may have been prompted by the chaos of the moment and some action that led the officers present to believe Tsarnaev had fired a weapon or was about to detonate explosives.
Law enforcement officials described the 30 minutes before the arrest of Tsarnaev as chaotic. One characterized it as “the fog of war” and said that in a highly charged atmosphere, one accidental shot could have caused what police call “contagious fire.”
Officers from several agencies gathered around the Watertown house as darkness fell. The FBI was in charge of the scene, but there also were officers from the Massachusetts State Police, local police and transit police. "They probably didn’t know whether he had a gun,... They couldn’t assume that he did not have a gun and more explosives.” ]
The discovery of Mr. Tsarnaev came just over 26 hours after the F.B.I. circulated pictures of him and his brother and called them suspects in Monday’s bombings. Law enforcement officials said that within hours of the pictures’ release, the two shot and killed a campus police officer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and after that, they carjacked a man nearby and drove off with him in his Mercedes S.U.V. [April 23/2013: A video surveillance camera shows the shooting and a failed effort to pull the officer’s gun, officials said. He had a triple-lock holster, and they could not figure it out,” a law enforcement official said. “There is evidence at the scene to suggest that they were going for his gun.” ]
At one point they drove to another vehicle, which the authorities believe was parked and unoccupied. There, the suspects got out and transferred materials, which the authorities believe included explosives and firearms, from the parked car to the sport utility vehicle.
The victim [escaped when the carjackers left the car, possibly to get cash from the ATM machines.] uninjured, at a gas station on Memorial Drive in Cambridge, law enforcement officials said.
After he called the police, they went off in search of his car, and a frenzied chase began. [April 24,2013: The carjacking victim left his cellphone in the Mercedes, a law enforcement official said, allowing officials to track it. ]
Finally, the brothers faced off against the police on a Watertown street in what officials and witnesses described as a furious firefight. More than 200 rounds were fired and a transit police officer was critically wounded.
A Watertown resident, Andrew Kitzenberg, 29, said he looked out his third-floor window to see two young men of slight build engaged in “constant gunfire” with police officers. A police vehicle “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 gunmen, 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.
When the shootout ended,Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, had been shot and fatally wounded. He was wearing explosives, several law enforcement officials said. But Dzhokhar Tsarnaev (joe-HARR tsar-NAH-yev) managed to escape — running over his older brother as he sped away, the officials said.
Officers went through houses one by one in a search for the suspect.
His disappearance, and fears that he could be armed with more explosives, set off an intense manhunt. SWAT teams and Humvees rolled through residential streets. Military helicopters hovered overhead. Bomb squads were called to several locations. And Boston, New England’s largest city, was essentially shut down.
A bomb disposal robot examined a car in Watertown, Mass., where the police conducted a house-to-house search for a suspect in the Boston Marathon bombing on Friday.
The scene was extraordinary. The hub of the universe, as Boston’s popular nickname would have it, was on lockdown from first light until near dark on Friday. A vast dragnet for one man had brought a major American city to a standstill. The people were gone, shops were locked, streets were barren, the trains did not run. The often-clogged Massachusetts Turnpike was as clear as a bowling lane.
... this raucous, sports-loving, patriotic old city became a ghost town. The governor had said to stay away, stay inside. His warning applied not only to the city, but to a half-dozen comfortable towns just outside its limits. The entire region had become a gigantic active crime scene.
Investigators tried to piece together a fuller picture of the two brothers, to determine more about the bombing at the Boston Marathon. The older brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, (tam-arr-lawn tsar-NAH-yev) was interviewed by the F.B.I. in 2011 when a foreign government asked the bureau to determine if he had extremist ties, according to a senior law enforcement official. The government knew that he was planning to travel there and feared that he might be a risk, the official said.
The F.B.I. concluded that he was not a threat. “We didn’t find anything on him that was derogatory,” the official said. The F.B.I. released a statement late Friday confirming it had scrutinized Mr. Tsarnaev but “did not find any terrorism activity, domestic or foreign.” It had requested more information from the foreign government, it said, but had not received it.
Now officials are scrutinizing that trip, to see if he might have met with extremists while abroad.
The brothers were born in Kyrgyzstan, an official said, and were of Chechen heritage. Chechnya, a long-disputed 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, killing tens of thousands of civilians as terrorist groups from the region staged attacks in central Russia.
Information about the man at large continued to develop. Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev is a 19-year-old of Chechen origin who attended the public Cambridge Rindge and Latin School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he was recognized as a Greater Boston Leauge winter all-star for wrestling. His brother Tamerlan, killed in last night’s shootout, was reportedly 26 years old and a Russian native. The brothers are reportedly both legal, permanent residents of the United States.
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The older one, who friends and family members said exerted a strong influence on his younger sibling — “He could manipulate him,” an uncle said.
The Tsarnaevs came with their family to the United States almost a decade ago from Kyrgyzstan, after living briefly in the Dagestan region of Russia.
A talented wrestler, Dzhokhar was listed as a Greater Boston League Winter All-Star. “He was a smart kid,” said Peter Payack, 63, assistant wrestling coach at the school. In 2011, the year he graduated, was awarded a $2,500 scholarship by the City of Cambridge, an honor granted only 35 to 40 students a year.
Tamerlan Tsarnaev after winning a boxing tournament in Lowell,
Mass., in 2010
For Tamerlan, life seemed more difficult. A promising boxer, he fought in the Golden Gloves National Tournament in 2009. Anzor Tsarnaev, the father, who returned to Russia about a year ago, said in a telephone interview there that his older son was hoping to become an American citizen — Dzhokhar became a naturalized citizen in 2012, but Tamerlan still held a green card — but that a 2009 domestic violence complaint was standing in his way.
“Because of his girlfriend, he hit her lightly, he was locked up for half an hour,” Mr. Tsarnaev said. “There was jealousy there.” Tamerlan later married and had a small child. He took care of their child while his wife worked.
A YouTube account that appears to have been run by Tsarnaev includes a playlist devoted to "terrorism", including one video in English titled The Emergence of Prophecy: The Black Flags from Khorasan. He also maintained a playlist devoted to Islam and one devoted to Timur Mutsuraev, a Chechen singer who sang of the republic's battle for freedom from Russia."I don't have a single American friend, I don't understand them," Tsarnaev said.
Tamerlan appears to have flirted with criminality, listing a series of texts on how to forge identity documents on his Amazon wishlist.
A YouTube account that appears to have been run by Tsarnaev includes a playlist devoted to "terrorism", including one video in English titled The Emergence of Prophecy: The Black Flags from Khorasan. He also maintained a playlist devoted to Islam and one devoted to Timur Mutsuraev, a Chechen singer who sang of the republic's battle for freedom from Russia."I don't have a single American friend, I don't understand them," Tsarnaev said.
Tamerlan appears to have flirted with criminality, listing a series of texts on how to forge identity documents on his Amazon wishlist.
At the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, Dzhokhar began to struggle academically. According to a university transcript reviewed by The New York Times, he was failing many of his classes. The transcript shows him receiving seven failing grades over three semesters.
There was little evidence of radicalisation as the 19-year-old went about his life. On his page on VKontakte, a Russian-language version of Facebook, Dzhokhar listed "career and money" as his principal interests. He listed his favourite song as "Hey Sexy Lady" by Shaggy. But when asked for his world view, he answered "Islam" and had recently added to links to jihadist material on the website.
The family were assisted by members of Boston's small Chechen community. But despite some academic success for the brothers, the family was clearly struggling. Financial help was sought from relatives while Anzor, a talented mechanic but unable to speak English, scratched a meagre income at $10 an hour. The mother of the two apparent bombers, Zubeidat, 45, was last year charged with stealing $1,600 (£1,000) of clothes.
There was little evidence of radicalisation as the 19-year-old went about his life. On his page on VKontakte, a Russian-language version of Facebook, Dzhokhar listed "career and money" as his principal interests. He listed his favourite song as "Hey Sexy Lady" by Shaggy. But when asked for his world view, he answered "Islam" and had recently added to links to jihadist material on the website.
The family were assisted by members of Boston's small Chechen community. But despite some academic success for the brothers, the family was clearly struggling. Financial help was sought from relatives while Anzor, a talented mechanic but unable to speak English, scratched a meagre income at $10 an hour. The mother of the two apparent bombers, Zubeidat, 45, was last year charged with stealing $1,600 (£1,000) of clothes.
The brothers - Dzhokhar in a white cap, Tamerlan in a black one -
near the finish line.
Gilberto Junior, who owns an auto body shop [and knew them], just saw them as “regular kids,” even if they had a taste for expensive cars.
So it did not especially alarm him when Dzhokhar rushed in on Tuesday, the day after the bombing, and said he needed his car immediately, never mind that the repairs had not been done and the white Mercedes wagon had no bumper and no taillights.
The younger Tsarnaev brother seemed nervous, he said. He was biting his nails and his knees were bending back and forth a bit; it occurred to Mr. Junior that he might be on drugs.