Boston Suspects Planned Attacks For July Fourth
The New York Times -- 2 May 2013
Shannon Stapleton/Reuters
Investigators in Cambridge,
Mass., on April 19, hours after Tamerlan Tsarneav, a suspect in the
Boston Marathon bombings, was killed in a police shootout.
By ERIC SCHMITT, MARK MAZZETTI, MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT and SCOTT SHANE
Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Anwar al-Awlaki, a cleric killed in 2011 in Yemen by an American drone strike.
WASHINGTON — The surviving suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings told F.B.I.
interrogators that, as he and his brother plotted their deadly assault,
they considered suicide attacks and striking on the Fourth of July,
according to two law enforcement officials.
But the suspect, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, told investigators that he and
his brother, Tamerlan, 26, who was killed in a shootout with the police,
ultimately decided to use pressure-cooker bombs and other homemade
explosive devices, the officials said.
The brothers finished building the bombs in Tamerlan’s apartment in
Cambridge, Mass., faster than they anticipated, and so decided to
accelerate their attack to the Boston Marathon on April 15, Patriots’
Day in Massachusetts, from July, according to the account that Dzhokhar
provided authorities. They picked the finish line of the marathon after
driving around the Boston area looking for alternative sites, according
to this account.
In addition, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has told authorities that he and his brother viewed the Internet sermons of Anwar al-Awlaki,
a radical American cleric who moved to Yemen and was killed in
September 2011 by an American drone strike. There is no indication that
the brothers communicated with Mr. Awlaki before his death.
Mr. Tsarnaev made his admission on April 21, two days after he was
captured while hiding in a boat in a nearby backyard, to specially
trained F.B.I. agents who 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 Supreme Court decision which in certain circumstances allows
interrogation after an arrest without notifying a prisoner of the right
to remain silent.
The new details about what Mr. Tsarnaev has told the authorities emerged
as the F.B.I. moved forward on Thursday with trying to determine how
the brothers were radicalized and the role that Tamerlan’s wife might
have played in the plot or in helping the brothers evade the authorities
after the attacks.
As part of those efforts, the authorities have sought to determine
whether fingerprints and DNA found on bomb fragments were from Mr.
Tsarnaev’s wife, Katherine Russell. According to two other law
enforcement officials, Ms. Russell’s fingerprints and DNA do not match
those found on the fragments.
Federal authorities are skeptical of Ms. Russell’s insistence that she
played no role in the attack or in helping the brothers elude the
authorities after the F.B.I. released photos of them. That skepticism
has been stoked by Ms. Russell’s decision in recent days to stop
cooperating with the authorities.
The F.B.I. has also decided to send more agents to Russia to assist with
the investigation, according to one law enforcement official. The
bureau has been relying on a couple of agents it has based in the United
States Embassy in Russia to serve as an intermediary with the
authorities there.
American and Russian investigators in Dagestan, in the turbulent
Caucasus region of southern Russia, have been trying to determine what
Tamerlan Tsarnaev did during a six-month visit to Dagestan last year. On
Thursday, Representative William Keating, Democrat of Massachusetts,
said the investigators believed that Mr. Tsarnaev met with one known
militant, Mahmoud Mansur Nidal, as first reported in the Russian
newspaper Novaya Gazeta.
“I’m comfortable that on that trip, he reached out to members of the
insurgency in Dagestan,” said Mr. Keating, a member of the House
Homeland Security Committee. He said that there was no evidence so far
that Tamerlan Tsarnaev succeeded in formally joining the insurgency, led
by a group calling itself the Caucasus Emirate, or that he received
explosives training in Dagestan.
At a news conference on Tuesday, President Obama did not rule out a
foreign link but suggested that the Tsarnaev brothers appeared to be
“self-radicalized” and that local, homegrown terrorist plots were harder
to detect and prevent than those originating overseas.
Mr. Obama said American counterterrorism efforts have put pressure “on
these networks that are well-financed and more sophisticated and can
engage and project transnational threats against the United States,” but
that “one of the dangers that we now face are self-radicalized
individuals who are already here in the United States.”
Stew Milne/Associated Press
Katherine Russell, Tamerlan Tsarnaev's wife.
Investigators believe that the views of the two brothers grew more
radical over time, and were influenced at least partly by the Internet
sermons of Mr. Awlaki. Separately, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has told
investigators that he and his brother learned to build the
pressure-cooker bombs from reading Inspire, the onlinemagazine published
by Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
The magazine’s first issue — which included an article titled “Make a
Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom” — gave instructions about how to carry
out crude, low-cost terrorist attacks.
The man officials have identified as the creative force behind Inspire,
an American citizen named Samir Khan, was killed in the same missile
strike in Yemen that killed Mr. Awlaki.
The new details of what Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has told authorities fill out a
growing portrait of what the grievously wounded young man told
investigators from his hospital bedside.
In the course of questioning him about whether he knew of any other
active plots or threats to public safety, Mr. Tsarnaev also admitted
that he had been involved in laying the bombs that killed three people
and injured more than 260 at the finish line of the marathon. He told
investigators that he knew of no other plots and that he and his brother
had acted alone, and he said he knew of no more bombs that had not been
detonated.
Since then, investigators have been seeking to verify Mr. Tsarnaev’s
statements as part of the wide-ranging investigation into the lives of
the two brothers, speaking with people who knew them and looking at
everything from items they left behind in their homes and, in the case
of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, his dorm room, to the lengthy digital trail they
left through their e-mails and posts on social media sites.
Labels: Crisis Politics, Immigration, Islamism, Terrorism, United States
posted by Pieface @ Thursday, May 02, 2013
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