Boston suspect in custody after massive manhunt

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Boston suspect in custody after massive manhunt

BOSTON

The search for the Boston Marathon bombers ended Friday night to the sound of flash-bang grenades and neighborhood cheers as the second of two Chechen American brothers was cornered, captured and taken away in an ambulance.

Boston police confirmed at about 8:45 p.m. that they had taken 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev into custody after they discovered him hiding in a boat stored behind a house in nearby Watertown, Mass. A trail of blood tipped off the boat's owner - and the police - to Tsarnaev's presence, ultimately leading to an apprehension and the climax to a violent week.

"We are so grateful to bring closure and justice to this case," Massachusetts State Police Col. Timothy Alben said at a 9:30 p.m. briefing. "We're exhausted, folks, but we have a victory here tonight."

Rick DesLauriers, special agent in charge of the FBI's Boston field office, added that "it seems like many months since Monday," when the horrific marathon explosions occurred. He stressed that this was a "truly intense investigation" involving myriad officers with the multi-agency Joint Terrorism Task Force.

Specially trained operators with the FBI's elite Hostage Rescue Team made the final capture, following a standoff and exchange of gunfire.

Tsarnaev was taken to a hospital, where doctors declared that he was in serious condition. The U.S. attorney for Massachusetts, Carmen Ortiz, said Friday night that no decision had been made about whether to seek the death penalty.

A federal law enforcement official said Tsarnaev would not be read his Miranda rights because the authorities would be invoking the public safety exception in order to question him extensively about potential explosive devices or accomplices and to try to gain intelligence.

The Boston Police Department announced on Twitter: "Suspect in custody. Officers sweeping the area." And Mayor Thomas M. Menino posted, "We got him."

As about 30 law enforcement officers - wearing helmets - walked away from the scene of what had been a tense standoff only minutes earlier, neighbors who had gathered on an adjacent street applauded and shouted, "Thank you! Thank you!"

"They finally caught the jerk," said nurse Cindy Boyle, 41. "It was scary; it was tense." She said she knew when police started clapping that everything would be all right.

President Barack Obama praised the law enforcement officials who brought the suspect into custody in a statement from the White House shortly after 10 p.m., saying, "We've closed an important chapter in this tragedy." The president said he had directed federal law enforcement officials to continue to investigate what had happened, and he urged people not to rush to judgment about the motivations behind the attacks.

The discovery of Tsarnaev came just over 26 hours after the FBI circulated pictures of him and his brother, Tamerlan, and called them suspects in Monday's bombings, which killed three people and wounded more than 170.

The case unfolded quickly - and lethally - after that. Law enforcement officials said that within hours of the release of the pictures, the two men shot and killed a campus police officer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, carjacked a sport utility vehicle, and led police on a chase, tossing several pipe bombs from their vehicle.

Then, early Friday morning, the men got into a pitched gunbattle with the police in Watertown in which more than 200 rounds were fired, and a transit police officer was critically wounded.

When the shootout ended, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, a former boxer, had been shot and fatally wounded. He was wearing explosives when he was killed, several law enforcement officials said. But his younger brother, Dzhokhar, managed to escape - running over his brother as he sped away, the officials said.

The disappearance of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, and fears that he could be armed with more explosives, set off one of the most intense manhunts in recent memory. SWAT teams and Humvees rolled through quiet residential streets. Military helicopters hovered overhead. Bomb squads were called to several locations. And Boston - New England's largest city - was essentially shut down.

Transit service was suspended all day. Classes at Harvard University, MIT, Boston University and other area colleges were canceled. Amtrak canceled service into Boston. The Red Sox game at Fenway Park was postponed, as was a concert at Symphony Hall.

Gov. Deval Patrick of Massachusetts urged residents to stay behind locked doors all day - not lifting the request until shortly after 6 p.m., when transit service in the shaken, seemingly deserted region was finally restored.

As the hundreds of police officers fanned out across New England looking for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 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, was interviewed by the FBI in 2011 when a foreign government asked the bureau to determine whether he had extremist ties, according to a senior law enforcement official. The government knew he was planning to travel there and was afraid he might be a risk, the official said.

The official would not say which government made the request, but his father said that he had traveled to Russia last year.

The FBI conducted a review and concluded that he was not a threat.

Now officials are scrutinizing that trip, to see whether he might have met with extremists.

The suspects' aunt, Maret Tsarnaeva, said on Canadian television that the father worked as a lawyer and in an "enforcement" agency in his home country, which she said eventually put him at risk.

"He is a soft-hearted, loving father," the aunt said.

The aunt said she was living in the United States in April 2002 when Dzhokhar arrived along with his mother and father, while the other brother and two sisters remained with relatives in Kazakhstan.

The family petitioned for refugee status; the father and mother are now living in the capital city of the Russian republic of Dagestan, where the father, Anzor, told television reporters Friday that he suspected his sons may have been set up as fall guys for what he denounced as a heinous attack in Boston.

"I honestly can't imagine who could do this," the father told a Dagestan TV station. "Whoever did this is a bastard."

The family has been disrupted in recent years, and interviews, social media and public records suggest they weren't close. An uncle, Ruslan Tsarni, told reporters he had little contact with his brother's family, but he would not elaborate on why.

A sister of the two suspects, interviewed by the FBI in suburban New Jersey, told reporters through a crack in her door that she had not been in frequent touch with her brothers.

"I never imagined that the children of my brother would be associated with that (bombing)," the uncle said, adding that they "put a shame on our family, (they) put a shame on the entire Chechen ethnicity."

The rapid developments began Thursday night, when the two men are believed to have fatally shot an MIT police officer, Sean Collier, 26, in his patrol car, the Middlesex County district attorney's office said.

Soon after that, a man was carjacked nearby by two armed men; when he was released, he told investigators that the men who took his vehicle said they were responsible for the marathon bombings, a law enforcement official said. Police went off in search of his car, and a frenzied chase began.

Police and the suspects traded gunfire, and "explosive devices were reportedly thrown" from the car by the suspects, the district attorney's office said. A transit police officer, Richard Donohue, was shot and critically wounded.

After a pitched gunbattle with police, Tamerlan Tsarnaev was fatally shot; the younger brother, Dzhokhar, managed to get away.

One law enforcement official said Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was wounded, and two other officials said authorities had tracked him at some point during the manhunt by his blood trail.

For much of Friday, a virtual army of heavily armed law enforcement officers went through houses in Watertown, outside Boston, one by one in a search for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.

Police had blocked off a 20-block residential area and emphatically urged people there to stay inside their homes and not answer their doors.

Davis, the Boston police commissioner, said: "We believe this to be a man who's come here to kill people, and we need to get him in custody."

Law-enforcement and counterterrorism officials were struggling to determine whether there were any accomplices still at large and whether the brothers had any connections to foreign or domestic terrorist organizations.

One law enforcement official said the FBI and police were seeking "a number of people with whom we would like to speak in furtherance of the investigation."

Asked if there were any suspected accomplices or co-conspirators, the official would say only that investigators were "not ready to classify anyone yet."

Several law-enforcement officials, asked about the tactics apparently employed by the brothers, said that, despite the devastation they are suspected of causing at the marathon, the death of one police officer and the grievous wounding of another, their planning appeared, at least at this point, to be flawed.

"They didn't practice tradecraft," said one official, a veteran counterterrorism investigator who has been briefed on the case. "Listen, I just don't understand how anybody could do something like that and basically go home and expect that they wouldn't get caught."

The New York Times, The Associated Press and McClatchy Newspapers contributed to this report.

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