Agents Pore Over Suspect’s Trip to Russia
By SCOTT SHANE and DAVID M. HERSZENHORN
F.B.I. agents are working closely with Russian security officials to
reconstruct Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s activities and connections in Dagestan
during his six-month visit last year, tracking meetings he may have had with
specific militants, his visits to a radical mosque and any indoctrination or
training he may have received, law enforcement officials said Sunday.
At the same time, the bureau is also still looking for “persons of interest”
in the United States who may have played a role in the radicalization of Mr.
Tsarnaev, 26, and his younger brother Dzhokhar, 19, before the Boston
Marathon bombing on April 15, Representative Mike Rogers, Republican of
Michigan and chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said on ABC
News’s “This Week” on Sunday. But Mr. Rogers said “the big unknown” remains
what happened in Russia.
Investigators believe it is likely the Tsarnaev brothers were
self-radicalized and got their bomb-making instructions strictly from the
Internet. But they are still exploring the possibility that other people in
Russia or the United States were critical influences, if not accomplices,
and officials say it may be weeks before the full picture of their plot is
clear.
Officials said they were still examining the conduct of the Tsarnaev
brothers’ mother, Zubeidat Tsarnaeva, and Tamerlan’s wife, Katherine
Russell, 24, who converted to Islam when she married him in 2010.
On Saturday, the Russian investigative newspaper Novaya Gazeta reported that
Mr. Tsarnaev had sought to join the Muslim insurgency in Dagestan and had
been in contact with several rebels who were killed by Russian authorities
in late spring of 2012 while he was staying in Makhachkala, the regional
capital. Mr. Tsarnaev left Dagestan in July 2012, just two days after a
shootout between militants and the police in which several militants were
killed, including William Plotnikov, 23, a Russian-born Canadian.
Investigators are trying to determine whether Mr. Tsarnaev and Mr. Plotnikov
met, one official said on Sunday.
In 2011, Russian officials sent a warning about Mr. Tsarnaev’s extremist
views to both the F.B.I. and the C.I.A., saying they believed he was coming
to Dagestan, a republic in southern Russia, to connect with underground
groups. That warning was based on telephone conversations intercepted by
Russian intelligence, including one between Mr. Tsarnaev and his mother, in
which they discussed jihad, Russian authorities have told the F.B.I.
Experts on the effort by Russian authorities to contain the Muslim
insurgency in Dagestan and elsewhere in the North Caucasus region said that
if officials were aware of Mr. Tsarnaev’s arrival in Dagestan in January
2012, he probably would have been under scrutiny throughout his time there.
“He would have been flagged at the airport, when he entered Dagestan and
when he went to the mosque,” said Jean-Francois Ratelle, a Canadian scholar
at George Washington University who is studying the insurgency in Dagestan.
Mr. Ratelle said that in his own research trips to Dagestan, he had been
stopped almost every day on the street by police officers checking his
registration papers, in part because he has a beard, which is seen as a
possible sign of religious devotion.
It is unclear how closely the police were tracking Mr. Tsarnaev, but his
mother described at least one instance in which her son was stopped by the
police along the beach in Makhachkala, where Mr. Tsarnaev’s parents live,
and brought in for questioning.
“He’s like: ‘The police came there and they asked for documents,’ ” Ms.
Tsarnaeva said at a news conference last week. “They asked him to follow. He
was asking them, he was like in shock. He’s like: ‘What, is there something
wrong with me? Am I strange, or don’t look like everybody?’ ”
At the news conference, the brothers’ father, Anzor Tsarnaev, acknowledged
that Mr. Tsarnaev had occasionally prayed at a mosque on Kotrova Street in
Makhachkala that is known as a gathering spot for some Salafists with
extremist views. The mosque is just a short walk from the soccer stadium for
the local Dynamo team. Graffiti, written in stark red on a white wall nearby
the mosque says, “Victory or paradise.”
In an interview, the imam at the Kotrova Street mosque, Khasan-Khadzhi
Gasanaliev, said he had never met Mr. Tsarnaev, and none of the men
interviewed outside the mosque over the course of several visits said they
had known him. Videos posted by Mr. Tsarnaev indicate that he was familiar
with Muslim rebel leaders in Dagestan, and investigators have been seeking
to determine if he met with any of them in person.
The account in Novaya Gazeta said that one of Mr. Tsarnaev’s contacts was
Mahmoud Mansur Nidal, who was killed on May 19 after a standoff with Russian
authorities at an apartment house in Makhachkala. Surrounded by Russian
security forces, Mr. Nidal took several hostages, according to the news
agency Interfax, and at one point threw a grenade at the authorities. The
hostages were released after some negotiation, but Mr. Nidal refused to
surrender and was shot dead, Interfax reported.
Another possible contact was Mr. Plotnikov, a Russian émigré to Canada who
became disenchanted with life there, converted to Islam and then moved to
Dagestan to join the Muslim insurgency. He had been trained in boxing by a
well-known Russian coach in Canada and was known among the Muslim rebels in
Dagestan as “The Canadian.” Mr. Plotnikov became a member of the Mujahideen
of the Caucasus Emirate and had briefly been detained by Russian
authorities.
Law enforcement officials have said that the marathon bombs were constructed
largely according to instructions in Inspire magazine, a publication of the
Qaeda branch in Yemen. But Representative Michael McCaul, a Texas Republican
and chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, said on “Fox News
Sunday” that “the level of sophistication” of the homemade pressure-cooker
bombs used at the marathon “leads me to believe that there was a trainer.”
Mr. Ratelle, the George Washington University scholar, said most militants
in Dagestan “see the U.S. as an enemy of Islam.”
“But it would not be their main target,” he said. “They wouldn’t be likely
to provide training for an attack on the U.S.” The Caucasus Emirate has
denied any role in the marathon bombing.
Andrew Roth and Ian Austen contributed reporting.
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