Boston bombs: Officials wait to question Dzhokhar Tsarnaev
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was taken into custody covered in blood
A top US interrogation group is waiting to question the surviving suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings.
He is under armed guard in hospital. Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick said the suspect was stable, but not yet able to communicate.
The teenager's brother, Tamerlan, died after a shoot-out with police.
Three people were killed and more than 170 others injured by Monday's twin bombing, close the finish line of the Boston Marathon.
Analysis
Miranda warnings - or more usually, Miranda rights - are designed to remind a suspect who has been arrested or is questioned in custody that they have certain constitutional rights, including the right to remain silent so as not to incriminate themselves and to have an attorney present during questioning.
Police officers are required to recite them, although not necessarily word for word, to a suspect. But there is an exception - and that's what happened in the case of the Boston bombing suspect Dzokhar Tsarnaev.
The exception was identified in a 1984 Supreme Court ruling which stated that "the need for answers to questions in a situation posing a threat to the public safety outweighs the need for the prophylactic rule protecting the Fifth Amendment's privilege against self-incrimination".
The exception has been used in a couple of high profile terror-related cases in recent years: against Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who was stopped while trying to set off a bomb hidden in his underpants on a plane bound for Detroit on Christmas Day 2009, and against Faisal Shahzad, who tried to detonate a bomb in New York's Times Square in 2010.
Applied to the Boston manhunt, if officers had read Dzhokhar Tsarnaev his Miranda rights, he might have stayed silent about any more bombs, any more attacks planned - or any co-conspirators.
Police officer Sean Collier was
shot dead during the police operation to find the brothers on Thursday
night. A transport officer was later seriously injured in the shoot-out
which left Tamerlan Tsarnaev fatally wounded.
He has vowed to seek answers on what motivated the alleged bombers and whether they had help.
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was found by a member of the public on Friday evening, shortly after a city-wide lockdown was ended. He was injured and hiding in a boat in a backyard, and was reportedly further injured in a fire fight with police.
The High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group - a multi-security agency unit specialising in questioning terror suspects - is waiting at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston as he recovers.
The BBC's David Willis, outside the hospital, says the suspect is suffering gunshot wounds to the neck and leg and has lost a lot of blood, so it could be a while before investigators are able to talk to him.
CBS News quoted investigators as saying that a wound to the neck may have been a suicide attempt.
Prosecutors are also at the scene, determining what charges the teenager might eventually face.
A federal charge of using a weapon of mass destruction to kill people carries a possible death sentence. There is no death penalty in the state of Massachusetts.
The Tsarnaev brothers
- Sons of Chechen refugees from the troubled Caucasus region of southern Russia
- Family is thought to have moved to the US in 2001, from Russian republic of Dagestan
- They lived in the Massachusetts town of Cambridge, home to Harvard University
- Dzhokhar, 19, was awarded a scholarship to pursue further education; he wanted to become a brain surgeon, according to his father
- Tamerlan, 26, was an amateur boxer who had reportedly taken time off college to train for a competition; he described himself as a "very religious" non-drinker and non-smoker
On Saturday, Governor Patrick
told reporters: "I, and I think all of the law enforcement
professionals, are hoping for a host of reasons that the suspect
survives because we have a million questions, and those questions need
to be answered."
The American Civil Liberties Union said such an exemption only applied in the case of immediate threats, and that the suspension of rights could not be "open-ended".
"Denial of rights is un-American and will only make it harder to obtain fair convictions," it said in a statement.
But Republican Senators John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina say Dzhokhar Tsarnaev should be treated as an "enemy combatant", meaning he would not be entitled to the same legal rights as a criminal defendant.
"We should be focused on gathering intelligence from this suspect right now that can help our nation understand how this attack occurred and what may follow in the future," their statement read.
One key line of inquiry will be a six-month trip made by Tamerlan Tsarnaev to Dagestan in the Russian Caucasus in 2012.
The news that one suspect had been killed and the second captured prompted scenes of celebration on the streets of Boston on Friday evening, with people cheering, honking car horns and waving American flags.
Elliot Friar, who lives close to where Monday's bombs exploded, said it was "a bittersweet moment" because of those who had lost their lives.
"But it was also a time for celebration because the city has been on edge and we're finally feeling more safe than we have in the past four days," he told the BBC.
The game went ahead on Saturday, with team members wearing the city's name on their shirts instead of the usual Red Sox and the stadium observing a moment of silence for the victims.
Law enforcement officials and family members have identified the Tsarnaev brothers as ethnic Chechens who had been living in America for about a decade.
The FBI had interviewed Tamerlan Tsarnaev in 2011 after a request from a foreign government, US law enforcements officials have confirmed.
But agents closed the case after finding no cause for concern.
Several members of the Tsarnaev family have condemned and disowned the brothers, but their parents have said that they could not have planned such an attack as they were being monitored by the FBI.
Their mother, Zubeidat Tsarnaeva, said she was "100% sure that this is set up, insisting in an interview with Russia Today that her sons had never had any involvement with terrorism.
Labels: Terrorism, United States
posted by Pieface @ Sunday, April 21, 2013
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