Medical workers treated Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev after he was found hiding in a boat in Watertown.
The FBI is investigating a trip that Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the 26-year-old suspected Boston Bomber who was killed in the first shootout with police, took to Chechnya and Dagestan in January 2012 . He reportedly went to the mainly Muslim regions in the north Caucasus area of Russia. Tamerlan spent six months in Dagestan, his father said he was just renewing his passport. Tamerlan could have had contact with militant Islamist groups while there. Authorities have yet to charge the surviving Chechen brother, who is represented by a public defender.
[The bureau admitted that it interviewed Tamerlan Tsarnaev in early 2011 at the request of a foreign government, believed to be Russia, which had concerns he was linked to Islamist terrorism. The FBI said it concluded he was not involved in terrorism..--The Guardian]
Investigators prepared to interview Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, the surviving suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings as they turned to finding a motive for the bombing. He remains in serious condition and unable to speak because of a bullet injury to his throat before his Friday capture. [Latest reports are that Tsarnaev is awake and answering questions in writing from his hospital bed. Authorities said that they believed he had tried to kill himself before his arrest. They believed that, based on the gunshot wound to his neck, the injury “had the appearance of a close range, self-inflicted style,” a senior law enforcement official said. “He’s not in good shape.” Law enforcement officials and forensic experts can typically determine how far a weapon was from the body when it was fired based on the appearance of the wound. ---NYT]
Were the bombings Sunday a crime or an act of terror? Will prosecutors seek the death penalty? Those are among the host of questions and legal issues raised by the capture in a post-Sept. 11 society. Federal authorities are preparing a criminal complaint against Tsarnaev, including the use of weapons of mass destruction. But the decision to seek the death penalty—which Massachusetts does not have—must be made by Attorney General Eric Holder. Three local residents were killed in the bombing and an MIT police officer was killed in a Friday gun battle with the suspects. Meanwhile, plans to question the Boston Marathon bombing suspect for a period without first reading him the Miranda warning of his right to remain silent and have a lawyer present has revived a constitutional debate on terrorism cases.
The work was painstaking and mind-numbing: One agent watched the same segment of video 400 times. The goal was to construct a timeline of images, following possible suspects as they moved along the sidewalks, building a narrative out of a random jumble of pictures from thousands of different phones and cameras.
It took a couple of days, but analysts began to focus on two men in baseball caps who had brought heavy black bags into the crowd near the marathon’s finish line but left without those bags.
[Governer Duvall] Patrick said the images of Suspect No. 2 reacting to the first explosion provided “highly incriminating” evidence, “a lot more than the public knows.”...
How federal and local investigators sifted through that ocean of evidence and focused their search on two immigrant brothers is a story of advanced technology and old-fashioned citizen cooperation. It is an object lesson in how hard it is to separate the meaningful from the noise in a world awash with information.
Charles Krupa/AP - An emergency responder and volunteers, including Carlos Arredondo, in the cowboy hat, push Jeff Bauman in a wheel chair after he was injured in an explosion near the finish line of the Boston Marathon
While the analysts combed through videos frame by frame, a more traditional tip was developing two miles away at Boston Medical Center. Jeffrey Bauman, groggy from anesthesia, his legs just removed at the knee, managed to eke out a request for pen and paper.
In the intensive-care ward, Bauman, who had been near the finish line to see his girlfriend complete Monday’s race, wrote words that would help lead to quick resolution of the bombing that killed three and injured 176 others: “Bag. Saw the guy, looked right at me.”....His tip became a critical lead, according to law enforcement officials.
Of course, investigators had 2,000 other leads, too, in the form of photos and video that “almost became a management problem, there was so much of it,” said Davis, who led the local piece of the probe, initially from a ballroom at the Westin Hotel where 100 officers and commanders from local, state and federal law enforcement collaborated. The room was equipped with tables for laptops, power strips and, most important, land lines, since cellphones were unreliable in the chaos after the bombing and satellite phones worked only if you stood by a window.
Davis had learned of the central importance of video from a police commander in London after the public transit bombings there in 2005, when the city’s extensive system of surveillance cameras led to identification of four suspects within five days of the attacks, after examination of hundreds of hours of video.
Eight years later, the social media revolution meant that the FBI and Boston authorities were under intense pressure to move even faster, because thousands of amateur sleuths were mimicking the official investigation, inspecting digital images of the crowd on Boylston Street and making their own often wildly irresponsible conclusions about who might be the bombers.On an investigative forum of Reddit.com, since removed from the site, users compiled thousands of photos, studied them for suspicious backpacks and sent their favorite theories spinning out into the wider Internet.....
The moderator defended this strategy by arguing that “it’s been proven that a crowd of thousands can do things like this much quicker and better. . . . I’d take thousands of people over a select few very smart investigators any day.”
In addition to being almost universally wrong, the theories developed via social media complicated the official investigation, according to law enforcement officials. Those officials said Saturday that the decision on Thursday to release photos of the two men in baseball caps was meant in part to limit the damage being done to people who were wrongly being targeted as suspects in the news media and on the Internet.
That decision, which appeared to be a straightforward request for the public’s help in identifying the two men, turns out to have been a tactic with several purposes.
As investigators reviewed images, the young men in the black and white baseball caps came to stand out from the rest, Davis said.
Law enforcement officials debated whether to release the photos, weighing the risk of the suspects fleeing or staging another attack against the prospect of quicker identification. Officials said they went ahead with the public appeal for three reasons:
●Investigators didn’t want to risk having news outlets put out the Tsarnaevs’ images first, which might have made them the object of a wave of popular sympathy for wrongly suspected people, as had happened with two high school runners from the Boston area whose photos were published on the front page of the New York Post under the headline “Bag Men.”....
●During a briefing Thursday afternoon, President Obama was shown the photos of the suspects by senior members of his national security team. Senior administration officials said that although Obama was not asked to approve release of the images by the FBI, the president offered a word of caution after viewing them. Be certain that these are the right suspects before you put the pictures out there, he advised his national security team, according to the administration officials.
●Investigators were concerned that if they didn’t assert control over the release of the Tsarnaevs’ photos, their manhunt would become a chaotic free-for-all, with news media cars and helicopters, as well as online vigilante detectives, competing with police in the chase to find the suspects. By stressing that all information had to flow to 911 and official investigators, the FBI hoped to cut off that freelance sleuthing and attend to public safety even as they searched for the brothers.
Davis said he was told that facial-recognition software did not identify the men in the ball caps. The technology came up empty even though both Tsarnaevs’ images exist in official databases: ....
Tamerlan had been the subject of some FBI investigation.
The FBI had had contact with Tamerlan at least as far back as 2011. Tamerlan, whose ethnic Chechen family immigrated to the United States in 2002, had indicated his interest in radical Muslim ideology both on Internet ramblings and with family and friends. On YouTube, Tamerlan created a playlist of videos titled “Terrorists.”....
The FBI said Friday that at the request of a foreign government that was concerned that Tamerlan “was a follower of radical Islam and a strong believer,” the agency had interviewed him and his relatives but “did not find any terrorism activity, domestic or foreign.”
Once the photos of the men in caps were made public Thursday, the FBI tip line filled with calls, including one from the brothers’ aunt, who provided her nephews’ identity, according to federal law enforcement officials.
As investigators expected, making the photos public not only brought in new information, but also spurred the brothers into action.
On Thursday evening, police responding to a robbery at a 7-Eleven in Cambridge examined surveillance video and noticed that in addition to the robber, the convenience store had been visited that night by two men who looked like the bombing suspects.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology Police Officer Sean Collier, 26, of Somerville, Mass., who was shot to death Thursday, April 18, 2013 on the school campus in Cambridge, Mass.
Then, shortly after a Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus officer was shot and killed, police got reports of an armed carjacking of a black Mercedes SUV nearby. The brothers had forced the vehicle’s driver to get them money from ATMs in the area. At a Shell station in Cambridge, the security camera provided “extremely good video of two suspects,” a clear match with the photos from Boylston Street, Davis said.
-----
The police commissioner said releasing images of the brothers may have spurred their violent rampage. “We may have forced their hands by releasing the videos,” he said. But he said that was nonetheless the right move: “I truly believe they were planning more attacks, based on the evidence we saw at Watertown. I think that by forcing their hand, we saved a much larger loss of life. . . . These individuals were bent on murder and mayhem.”
[The Boston police commissioner, Edward Davis, speaking to CBS News, said that the authorities believed that Mr. Tsarnaev, along with his older brother Tamerlan, 26, were planning more attacks. “We have reason to believe, based upon the evidence that was found at that scene — the explosions, the explosive ordinance that was unexploded and the firepower that they had — that they were going to attack other individuals,” he said. They were armed with a small arsenal of guns, ammunition and explosives when they first confronted police. --NYT]
After a tense day of searches on the silent streets of a locked-down city, David Henneberry was eager to get some air. As soon as authorities lifted the stay-inside order Friday just before dusk, Henneberry stepped out of his Watertown house.
Something about his boat seemed off. The plastic cover was flapping in the wind, which made no sense, especially given that Henneberry had tied it down so well that it hadn’t moved even through this winter’s blizzards.
On inspection, the cover appeared to have been sliced open. Then Henneberry saw the blood. He came closer, pulled himself up a ladder to peer inside and saw more blood — and a curled-up form. He called 911....
Police had used thermal imaging technology to see that a human form was under the boat’s white plastic cover. ...They pounded the boat with flashbang grenades, a powerful concussive force, to see if the suspect would react; he barely did. Finally, an FBI negotiator on a bullhorn roused Dzhokhar and spent 25 minutes persuading him to come out. Local police cuffed the suspect, who was then taken by ambulance for medical attention to two gunshot wounds, probably suffered the previous night in the shootout with police.
[NY TIMES: One unanswered question is whether others helped plan and carry out the attack, which federal officials said was still under investigation. Mr. Menino said he believed the brothers were not affiliated with a larger network. “All of the information that I have, they acted alone, these two individuals, the brothers,” he said.
...As prosecutors worked to complete the criminal complaint against Mr. Tsarnaev that will detail the charges, hundreds of police detectives and F.B.I. agents — including members of the Joint Terrorist Task Force in Boston, along with nearly 250 agents from 24 of the F.B.I.’s 56 field offices — continued to work on the investigation, officials said.
Their efforts included analyzing records from the brothers’ phones and computers, searching their browsing histories to find associates and witnesses and extremist group affiliations. The agents also scoured the brothers’ credit card records and other material seized from their apartment and car for evidence of bomb components, the backpacks used or anything other evidence that could tie them to the bombings on Monday or the shootings later in the week.]
After the arrest, Davis, exhausted but relieved, stood in the rain and looked back on four frenzied days of rugged, hurried and dangerous police work....he said, he watched how first responders and ordinary citizens put people back together. “Tourniquets,” Davis said. “Stemming the bleeding with their hands. Putting a man who was on fire out with their hands. These are the kind of things that came out of this savagery. It makes me proud.”