What precisely is extreme or non-mainstream about his Islamic beliefs?
B
Boston Suspect Cites Islamic Extremist Beliefs as Motive By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE, MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT and WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM
BOSTON - The surviving suspect in the Boston Marathon attacks told federal agents that he and his late brother were motivated by extremist Islamic beliefs but that they were not connected to any known terrorist groups, law enforcement officials said on Tuesday, saying that he made those statements in an interview Sunday from his hospital bed.
The investigators have been conducting a wide-ranging inquiry into the two brothers, speaking with people who knew them and looking at everything from the things they left behind in their homes and a dorm room to the digital trail they left through e-mails and social media.
Based on the inquiry so far - and on the interview conducted with the sole surviving suspect, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, in which law-enforcement officials said that he acknowledged playing a role in the attacks - the officials believe that the two men acted alone in the attacks, which killed three and injured more than 260. Part of the investigation is now focused on corroborating Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's statements. His older brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, was killed early Friday morning after a shootout with the police in Watertown, Mass.
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's condition improved on Tuesday, officials said. Mr.
Tsarnaev, who had been listed in serious condition for several days by Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, was listed in fair condition on Tuesday, the F.B.I. said in a statement.
The brothers may have been planning the attacks for several months. On Feb.
6 Tamerlan Tsarnaev purchased fireworks at a Phantom Fireworks store in Seabrook, N.H., about an hour's drive north of Boston, said William Weimer, the vice president of Phantom Fireworks, which is based in Youngstown, Ohio, and has 68 stores in 15 states.
"He came in and he asked the question that 90 percent of males ask when they walk into a fireworks store: 'What's the most powerful thing you've got?' "
Mr. Weimer said in a telephone interview, adding that the store's clerk had described the sale as "uneventful."
Mr. Tsarnaev settled on a reloadable mortar kit called a "Lock and Load,"
which comes with a launch tube and shells, Mr. Weimer said. But Mr. Weimer said that even if the brothers had harvested all the powder from the shells Mr. Tsarnaev bought that day, he does not believe it would not have yielded enough explosives to make the two pressure cooker bombs that exploded on Boylston Street and the other devices that the suspects had with them when they were chased by the police early Friday morning. The sale was first reported by The Wall Street Journal.
In the affidavit accompanying the criminal charges against Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, an F.B.I. agent said that "a large pyrotechnic" had been found his dormitory room at Pine Dale Hall at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth.
Mr. Weimer said that the company, which sold fireworks in 2010 to Faisal Shahzad, who unsuccessfully tried to detonate a car bomb in Times Square, had checked its records for Mr. Tsarnaev's name as soon as it was made public, and gave the information to the F.B.I.
Outside the home of the Tsarnaev brothers' parents in Makhachkala, Russia, friends of the family told reporters Tuesday afternoon that their mother, Zubeidat Tsarnaeva, had grown distraught after seeing a photograph of the dead body of their older son, Tamerlan, on television.
Kheda Saratova, a well-known Chechen human rights activist and friend of the family, told reporters: "Please don't torture this family, they want to wait awhile, they are in terrible grief. Please."
"We must defend this family while the case is being investigated, so we can't say anything for now," she said.
Mrs. Tsarnaeva, who has given a number of interviews in recent days, walked out from behind her wearing a bright yellow head scarf, and made her way, through a scrum of photographers and reporters, to hail a taxi. "My son is just my son," she said in English.
In Boston, meanwhile, Martin Richard, the 8-year-old boy killed in the bombings, was remembered at a private funeral with his immediate family on Tuesday morning.
"The outpouring of love and support over the last week has been tremendous,"
said his parents, Bill and Denise, in a statement distributed by a family spokesman. "This has been the most difficult week of our lives and we appreciate that our friends and family have given us space to grieve and heal."
The family said they planned to hold a public memorial for Martin in the coming weeks.
And in Stoneham, roughly 12 miles outside of Cambridge, Mass., some 200 officers arrived at a funeral home on Common Street on Tuesday morning to pay their respects to the family of Sean Collier, a campus police officer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who was shot and killed last Thursday night. Law-enforcement officials have said that they believe that the Tsarnaev brothers were responsible for his death, but have not said what evidence leads them to believe that. Hundreds of family and friends later flowed into nearby St. Patrick's Church for a private funeral Mass that began at 10 a.m., according to a spokeswoman for the Anderson-Bryant Funeral Home.
The information on the motive behind the bombing came as specially trained F.B.I. agents interviewed Mr. Tsarnaev on Sunday as he recovered in a Boston hospital bed from gunshot wounds to the head, neck, legs and hand that he sustained in the shootout with police officers early Friday morning that left his brother dead. One law enforcement officer said that Mr. Tsarnaev's neck wound appeared to be the result of a self-inflicted gunshot.
The agents had been waiting outside his hospital room for him to regain consciousness. After he woke up, they questioned him, invoking what is known as the public safety exception to the Miranda Rule, a procedure authorized by a 1984 U.S. Supreme Court decision that in certain circumstances allows interrogation after an arrest without notifying a prisoner of the right to remain silent.
The bombings, which killed three people, injured more than 260 people - far more than the 170 injured people that the authorities initially reported, officials said Tuesday. The revised figures are based on reports that the Boston Public Health Commission has received from 26 hospitals in the Boston area.
"We have seen a steady increase in the number of patients," Nick Martin, a spokesman for the Boston Public Health Commission said on Tuesday morning, adding that some people who were injured, but not seriously, had not sought medical care immediately. "An example is people with hearing problems who might have initially assumed it was a temporary issue. But it lasted longer than they thought it would."
As the new details over the motivation behind the bombings - and the devastation they wrought - emerged, there were signs that life in Boston was returning to normal. Block by block, a stretch of Boylston Street in the heart of Boston's Back Bay neighborhood began to reopen on Tuesday, more than a week after the deadly bombings had turned it into a crime scene. And the Boston Police Department began returning property that people had left behind as they fled from the bombings.
Mr. Tsarnaev was charged in the attacks in a brief but dramatic bedside scene Monday in the intensive care ward of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.
At the legal hearing Monday, he shook his head in response to most questions. The bedside session began when Magistrate Judge Marianne B.
Bowler asked a doctor whether Mr. Tsarnaev was alert, according to a transcript of the proceeding.
"You can rouse him," the judge told the doctor.
"How are you feeling?" asked the doctor, identified in the transcript as Dr.
Odom. "Are you able to answer some questions?" He nodded.
Judge Bowler then read Mr. Tsarnaev his rights. Also present were two United States attorneys and three federal public defenders, who will be representing him. Judge Bowler asked if he understood his right to remain silent, to which he nodded affirmatively, according to the transcript.
The only word Mr. Tsarnaev uttered, apparently, was "No," after he was asked if he could afford a lawyer.
Judge Bowler said, "Let the record reflect that I believe the defendant has said, 'No.' "
At the end of the session, Judge Bowler said: "At this time, at the conclusion of the initial appearance, I find that the defendant is alert, mentally competent, and lucid. He is aware of the nature of the proceedings." If convicted, he faces the death penalty or life behind bars.
The charges were lodged in a criminal complaint unsealed Monday in Federal District Court, the first step in a lengthy process.
The White House said that Mr. Tsarnaev would not be placed in military detention. "We will prosecute this terrorist through our civilian system of justice," said Jay Carney, the White House press secretary.
He noted that it was illegal to try an American citizen in a military commission, and that a number of high-profile terrorism cases had been handled in the civilian court system, including that of the would-be bomber who tried to bring down a passenger jet around Christmas 2009 with explosives in his underwear.
On Monday, a funeral was held for Krystle Campbell, the 29-year-old restaurant manager killed near the finish line of the marathon. In the evening, hundreds more attended a memorial service at Boston University for Lu Lingzi, 23, a Chinese graduate student who was killed in the bombings.
New details were included in the affidavit accompanying the criminal complaint, which also outlined the evidence that law enforcement agencies have collected linking the two suspects to the bombings. However, there was no mention in the affidavit of the killing of the campus police officer, nor any explanation why it was not mentioned.
The affidavit, sworn by Daniel R. Genck, an F.B.I. special agent assigned to the Joint Terrorist Task Force in Boston, cited surveillance video as it detailed the movements the brothers made around the time of the bombings.
In chilling detail, the affidavit described how a man it referred to as "Bomber Two," whom it identified as Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, could be seen "apparently slipping his knapsack onto the ground."
Video from a nearby restaurant, Forum, showed the bomber remaining in place, checking his cellphone and even appearing to take a picture with it, the affidavit said. Then he seemed to speak into his phone.
"A few seconds after he finishes the call, the large crowd of people around him can be seen reacting to the first explosion," the court papers said.
"Virtually every head turns to the east (towards the finish line) and stares in that direction in apparent bewilderment and alarm. Bomber Two, virtually alone among the individuals in front of the restaurant, appears calm. He glances to the east and then calmly but rapidly begins moving to the west, away from the direction of the finish line."
"He walks away without his knapsack, having left it on the ground where he had been standing," the court papers said. "Approximately 10 seconds later, an explosion occurs in the location where Bomber Two had placed his knapsack."
Just seven hours after the F.B.I. released pictures of the two suspects on Thursday afternoon to the public, one of the suspects emerged in Cambridge, pointing a gun at a man sitting in his car.
The affidavit said that the driver eventually escaped and his stolen vehicle was located soon thereafter in Watertown. As the two suspects drove around, they tossed at least two small homemade bombs from the car window, the affidavit said. When the police caught up with the men on Laurel Street, they engaged in a gunfight.
At the scene of the shootout, the F.B.I. found more clues: two unexploded bombs and the remnants of "numerous" exploded devices, which were similar to those found at the scene of the marathon bombings - and at least one was in a pressure cooker, the affidavit said. "The pressure cooker was of the same brand as the ones used in the Marathon explosions," it said.
As the legal process was playing out, investigators were still working feverishly to determine the motives for the attacks. A lawyer for Katherine Russell, who married Tamerlan Tsarnaev in 2010, said that Ms. Russell found out that her husband was a suspect in the bombings only after the authorities released the photos on Thursday.
"She was shocked," said the lawyer, Amato A. DeLuca. "She had no idea."
Mr. DeLuca said that he had been speaking with law enforcement authorities but declined to say whether Ms. Russell had. He also declined to elaborate on whether his client had seen changes in her husband recently. He did say that his client did not speak Russian, so she could not always understand what her husband was saying.
==========================================
(F)AIR USE NOTICE: All original content and/or articles and graphics in this message are copyrighted, unless specifically noted otherwise. All rights to these copyrighted items are reserved. Articles and graphics have been placed within for educational and discussion purposes only, in compliance with "Fair Use" criteria established in Section 107 of the Copyright Act of 1976.
The principle of "Fair Use" was established as law by Section 107 of The Copyright Act of 1976. "Fair Use" legally eliminates the need to obtain permission or pay royalties for the use of previously copyrighted materials if the purposes of display include "criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research." Section 107 establishes four criteria for determining whether the use of a work in any particular case qualifies as a "fair use". A work used does not necessarily have to satisfy all four criteria to qualify as an instance of "fair use". Rather, "fair use" is determined by the overall extent to which the cited work does or does not substantially satisfy the criteria in their totality. If you wish to use copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use,' you must obtain permission from the copyright owner. For more information go to:
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml
THIS DOCUMENT MAY CONTAIN COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL. COPYING AND DISSEMINATION IS PROHIBITED WITHOUT PERMISSION OF THE COPYRIGHT OWNERS.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment