Investigators Seek Boston Bombing Suspect's Laptop

 

Investigators Seek Boston Bombing Suspect's Laptop

Gretchen Ertl for The New York Times

 

Windows were cleaned Thursday as the Atlantic Fish Company, near a bombing

site, prepared to open for the weekend.

By SERGE F. KOVALESKI and MICHAEL COOPER

Published: April 25, 2013

 

BOSTON - The search for evidence in the Boston Marathon bombings sent

white-suited investigators combing through the garbage at a landfill in New

Bedford, Mass., on Thursday as they hunted for a laptop computer belonging

to one of the suspects, a law enforcement official said.

 

Investigators have been searching for several days for the laptop that they

believe belonged to one of the two brothers suspected of setting off bombs

at the Boston Marathon last week that killed three people and wounded more

than 260, several law enforcement officials said.

 

They believe that the computer may have been thrown out, and they searched

the Crapo Hill Landfill in New Bedford, near the University of Massachusetts

Dartmouth, where one brother, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, who was charged in the

bombings this week, was a student.

 

New details continued to emerge about the bombing plot and last week's

manhunt for the suspects. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York called a

news conference at City Hall to announce that Mr. Tsarnaev had told

investigators from his hospital bed that he and his older brother, Tamerlan,

had decided to drive to New York last Thursday night to use their remaining

explosive devices in Times Square. Law enforcement officials confirmed the

account, but said the brothers' intention appeared to have been more of a

spontaneous idea than a real, thought-out plan.

 

Officials continued to revise and, in some cases, correct some of their

initial accounts of the manhunt during the fast-moving events of last week.

An armed carjacking that state and federal officials at first said last week

had occurred in Cambridge, Mass., actually appears to have taken place

across the Charles River in Allston, a Boston neighborhood, several law

enforcement officials said Thursday.

 

A Cambridge police spokesman, Dan Riviello, said the authorities were still

trying to sort out whether the suspects, believed to be the brothers, had a

car, or what car they used, in fleeing the location of a shooting earlier

that night of an M.I.T. police officer in Cambridge, a few miles from

Allston.

 

Angel Sifontes, 27, who works at a Hess gas station on Brighton Avenue in

Allston, said detectives investigating the carjacking had visited the

station to see if its cameras had caught any images of the crime. "I was

here when they came," he said, adding that the carjacking was apparently out

of range of the cameras.

 

The Cambridge police initially said the carjacking had been carried out by

two men "in the area of Third Street in Cambridge." A sworn affidavit from

an F.B.I. agent accompanying the criminal complaint against Dzhokhar

Tsarnaev that was unsealed on Monday said "an individual carjacked a vehicle

at gunpoint in Cambridge, Massachusetts."

 

Christina Sterling, a spokeswoman for the United States attorney's office in

Massachusetts, said Thursday that officials had written "Cambridge" in the

affidavit because that is what investigators believed at the time. She said

that "has since changed."

 

And a law enforcement official said that although ballistics tests were

still being done, officials believed that most of the bullets that were

fired in a shootout between the police and the brothers in Watertown, Mass.,

early Friday morning were fired by police officers. One law enforcement

official said that "most of the expended rounds were from law enforcement,

no doubt about it."

 

Only one gun has been recovered from the brothers, officials said. The law

enforcement official, noting that the brothers had thrown explosive devices

during the battle, including a pressure-cooker bomb similar to the ones used

at the marathon, said it was "like a combat situation." Tamerlan Tsarnaev

was mortally wounded after the battle.

 

"Anybody in the area was trying to shoot them, which is within protocol,"

the official said. "Every time that an explosive device went off, somebody

took a shot."

 

Several law enforcement officials said that because Dzhokhar Tsarnaev did

not have a gun when he was captured after the shootout, hiding in a boat in

a nearby backyard, the gunshot wound in his neck could not have been

self-inflicted, as some law enforcement officials had said they believed

earlier. Contrary to initial reports that the police had "exchanged" gunfire

with the suspect, the official said it appeared that police officers

surrounding the boat had apparently fired into it after they saw something

push through the boat's tarp, and feared it might be an explosive device or

a gun.

 

"One officer then fired," the law enforcement official said. "The other

officers there, hearing a shot going off, thought it was coming from the

suspect and started shooting until the cease-fire was ordered."

 

In Makhachkala, Russia, the parents of the Tsarnaev brothers said at a news

conference that their sons were innocent. Although officials said they had

video evidence of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev putting down a knapsack where one bomb

exploded, and law enforcement officials have said he admitted to a role in

the bombings, the suspects' mother, Zubeidat Tsarnaeva, said she would not

accept that her sons were guilty. "No I don't - and I won't," she snapped.

"Never!"

 

==========================================

(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.