One Suspect Dead, One Caught After Night of Violence, Death of an Officer and Lockdown in Boston

Spectators clapped and cheered as law enforcement officers left the scene in Watertown


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.

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.

Searching in Watertown. The suspects were identified as brothers, immigrants of Chechen heritage.

Residents of Watertown were questioned by law enforcement officials.

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 younger one — the one their father described as “like an angel” — gathered around him a group of friends so loyal that more than one said they would testify for him, if it came to that.

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.
 

 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.

 

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.

 

 

F.B.I. Posts Images of Pair Suspected in Boston Attack

NY TIMES

Officials said they have images of one of the men putting a black backpack on the ground just minutes before two near-simultaneous blasts went off near the finish line of the marathon at 2:50 p.m. on Monday. One video, which officials said they did not release, shows the two men walking slowly away after a bomb exploded while the crowd fled.

At a news briefing here, Richard DesLauriers, the special agent in charge of the F.B.I.’s Boston field office, initiated the unprecedented crowd-sourcing manhunt by urging the public to look at the pictures and video on the F.B.I.’s Web site, fbi.gov. The two men appear to be in their 20s, but Mr. DesLauriers did not characterize their appearance or offer an opinion as to their possible ethnicity or national origin.

“Somebody out there knows these individuals as friends, neighbors, co-workers, or family members of the suspects,” Mr. DesLauriers said firmly and grimly into the cameras. “Though it may be difficult, the nation is counting on those with information to come forward and provide it to us.”

 

Michael R. Bouchard, a former assistant director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, said that in releasing the pictures and video, the authorities took a calculated risk.

“If you don’t release the photos, the bad guys don’t know you’re on to them while you’re looking,” said Mr. Bouchard, who helped oversee the Washington-area sniper case in 2002 and now runs his own security firm in Vienna, Va. “If you do release them, you run the risk they see them and change their appearance or go underground. The authorities made a calculated decision the benefits of releasing the photos outweighed the risks of holding back and trying to identify them themselves.”

 

They don’t know if these guys are from out of town, so they had to cast their net wider,” said Mr. Bouchard, who said the widespread use of social media and cellphones make such identifications easier than just a few years ago.

At the briefing, Mr. DesLauriers did not specify what led the F.B.I. to call the two men suspects, but he said that the decision was “based on what they do in the rest of the video.” According to officials, when the blasts went off, most people fled in panic, but these two did not and instead walked away slowly, almost casually.

“We have a lot more video than what we released,” the official said. “The sole purpose of what we released was to show the public what they looked like.”

 

The fact that F.B.I. officials chose to make the video images public suggested to some people familiar with law enforcement tactics that they have not been able to match them with faces in government photo databases, said Jim Albers, senior vice president at MorphoTrust USA, which supplies facial recognition technology to the United States. The F.B.I. has a collection of mug shots of more than 12 million people, mostly arrest photos.

 That could be a question of the quality of the images of the two suspects — the video clips posted by the bureau do not include high-resolution frontal images of the two men’s faces, as would be ideal for facial recognition software, Mr. Albers said. Or it may be that the search software, which produces a list of matches ranked by probability, simply did not find a persuasive match.

 

 

 

 

 

BOSTON BOMBS WERE LOADED TO MAIM

 Michael Dwyer/Associated Press                          
 Neighbors at the home of the parents of Krystle Campbell, who died.






NY TIMES

The explosives that killed three people and injured more than 170 during the Boston Marathon on Monday were most likely rudimentary devices made from ordinary kitchen pressure cookers, except they were rigged to shoot sharp bits of shrapnel into anyone within reach of their blast and maim them severely, law enforcement officials said Tuesday.

[Officials tell CBS News that the bombs detonated at the Boston Marathon finish line on Monday were low-grade, improvised explosive devices containing nails and ball bearings. Doctors treating the wounded also report removing metal shrapnel, including BB pellets, from the victims. The bombs were made to look like discarded property, though it is still unknown whether they were placed in trash cans or on the sidewalk, officials say.]

The pressure cookers were filled with nails, ball bearings and black powder, and the devices were triggered by “kitchen-type” egg timers, one official said.

The resulting explosions sent metal tearing through skin and muscle, destroying the lower limbs of some victims who had only shreds of tissue holding parts of their legs together when they arrived at the emergency room of Massachusetts General Hospital, doctors there said.

Law enforcement officials said the devices were probably hidden inside dark nylon duffel bags or backpacks and left on the street or sidewalk near the finish line. Forensic experts said that the design and components of the homemade devices were generic but that the marking “6L,” indicating a six-liter container, could help identify a brand and manufacturer and possibly lead to information on the buyer.

 

New details about the explosives emerged as President Obama announced that the F.B.I. was investigating the attack as “an act of terrorism,” and made plans to come to Boston on Thursday for an interfaith service at the Cathedral of the Holy Cross.

Among the three dead was an 8-year-old boy, Martin Richard of Dorchester. The boy had been watching near the finish line and then moved back into the crowd; the blast killed him and severely injured his mother and his sister. Another spectator, Krystle Campbell, 29, of Arlington, Mass., also died Monday from injuries she suffered while watching the marathon. The third person who died was identified by Boston University officials as a graduate student there, and the Chinese Consulate in New York said that she was a Chinese national. The university is waiting for permission from the family before releasing her name. She was watching the race close to the finish line.

Boston is home to some of the most renowned medical institutions in the country. Doctors at Massachusetts General Hospital said that none of the hospitals were overwhelmed, allowing victims to be attended to in rapid order and saving lives in the process. Some victims were wounded so badly that even a delay of a few minutes could have been fatal, doctors said.

 

The scale of the attack and the crude nature of the explosives, coupled with the lack of anyone claiming to have been the perpetrator, suggested to experts that the attacker could be an individual or a small group rather than an established terrorist organization.

 

Nonetheless, a senior law enforcement official said that authorities were also looking into connections between pressure cookers and Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the Qaeda franchise in Yemen, largely because the design of the explosive device was described in a 2010 issue of the group’s online English magazine, Inspire.

“The pressurized cooker is the most effective method,” the article said. “Glue the shrapnel to the inside of the pressurized cooker.” The article was titled “Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom.”

Pressure cookers are designed to cook food quickly at high pressure. Pressure cooker bombs work when explosive powder is set off inside the pot and the resulting pressure builds until it exceeds the ability of the pot to contain it, creating a blast of tremendous force. Rudimentary explosive devices made from pressure cookers have been widely used in attacks in Afghanistan, India, Nepal and Pakistan, all countries where the cooking device is common, according to a Department of Homeland Security warning notice issued in 2010.

 

But they have occasionally turned up in attacks in the United States as well:Faisal Shahzad, an American citizen who attempted a car-bomb attack on Times Square in May 2010, had a pressure cooker loaded with 120 firecrackers among the improvised explosives in his S.U.V. The devices smoked but never exploded.

 

One brand of pressure cooker with “6L” on the bottom is made by the Spanish company Fagor, which, according to its Web site, is the fifth-largest appliance maker in Europe, with factories in six countries, including Spain, China and Morocco, and subsidiaries in nearly a dozen more.The company sells about 50,000 of the six-liter pots in the United States every year, said Sara de la Hera, the vice president for sales and marketing at Fagor’s United States subsidiary

BLASTS AT BOSTON MARATHON KILL 3 AND INJURE 100

Two powerful bombs exploded near the finish line of the Boston Marathon on Monday afternoon, killing three people, including an 8-year-old child, and injuring more than 100, as one of this city’s most cherished rites of spring was transformed from a scene of cheers and sweaty triumph to one of screams and carnage.

NY TIMES

Almost three-quarters of the 23,000 runners who participated in the race had already crossed the finish line when a bomb that had apparently been placed in a garbage can exploded around 2:50 p.m. in a haze of smoke amid a crowd of spectators on Boylston Street, just off Copley Square in the heart of the city. Thirteen seconds later, another bomb exploded several hundred feet away.

Pandemonium erupted as panicked runners and spectators scattered, and rescue workers rushed in to care for the dozens of maimed and injured, some of whom lost legs in the blast, witnesses said. The F.B.I. took the lead role in the investigation on Monday night, and Richard DesLauriers, the special agent in charge of the bureau’s Boston office, described the inquiry at a news conference as “a criminal investigation that is a potential terrorist investigation.”

 

The reverberations were felt far outside the city, with officials in New York and Washington stepping up security at important locations. Near the White House, the Secret Service cordoned off Pennsylvania Avenue out of what one official described as “an abundance of caution.”

 

"The first one went off, I thought it was a big celebratory thing, and I just kept going,” recalled Jarrett Sylvester, 26, a runner from East Boston, who said it had sounded like a cannon blast. “And then the second one went off, and I saw debris fly in the air. And I realized it was a bomb at that point. And I just took off and ran in the complete opposite direction.”

 

 Some law enforcement officials noted that the blasts came at the start of a week that has sometimes been seen as significant for radical American antigovernment groups: it was the April 15 deadline for filing taxes, and Patriots’ Day in Massachusetts, the start of a week that has seen violence in the past. April 19 is the anniversary of the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.

 The blast was so powerful that it blew out shop windows and damaged a window on the third floor of the Central Library in Copley Square, which was closed to the public for Patriots’ Day.

A number of people were taken to Massachusetts General Hospital, said Dr. Alasdair Conn, the hospital’s chief of emergency services — and several had lost their legs.

“This is like a bomb explosion we hear about in Baghdad or Israel or other tragic points in the world,” Dr. Conn said.