With the Boston marathon bombing suspect in a prison hospital, investigators are pushing forward both in the US and abroad to piece together the myriad details of a plot that killed three people and injured more than 260.
FBI agents have wrapped up a two-day search at a landfill near the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, where 19-year-old suspect, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, was a second-year student. FBI spokeswoman Laura Eimiller wouldn’t say what investigators were looking for or whether they recovered anything from the landfill before the search ended yesterday.
Meanwhile, US officials said the mother of the bombing suspects had been added to a federal terrorism database about 18 months before the April 15 attack a disclosure that deepens the mystery around the Tsarnaev family and marks the first time American authorities have acknowledged that Zubeidat Tsarnaeva was under investigation before the tragedy.
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is charged with joining with his older brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, now dead, in setting off the shrapnel-packed pressure-cooker bombs. The brothers are ethnic Chechens from Russia who came to the US about a decade ago with their parents.
Investigators have said it appears the brothers were angry about the US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Two Government officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to speak publicly about the investigation, said the CIA had Zubeidat Tsarnaeva’s name added to the terror database along with that of her son Tamerlan after Russia contacted the agency in 2011 with concerns that the two were religious militants.
About six months earlier, the FBI investigated mother and son, also at Russia’s request, one of the officials said. The FBI found no ties to terrorism.
In an interview from Russia, Tsarnaeva said yesterday that she has never been linked to terrorism.
“It’s all lies and hypocrisy,” she said from Dagestan.
“I’m sick and tired of all this nonsense that they make up about me and my children. People know me as a regular person, and I’ve never been mixed up in any criminal intentions, especially any linked to terrorism.”
Tsarnaeva faces shoplifting charges in the US over the theft of more than $1,624 worth of women’s clothing from a Lord & Taylor department store in Natick in 2012.
Earlier this week, she said she has been assured by lawyers that she would not be arrested if she travelled to the US, but she said she was still deciding whether to go. The suspects’ father, Anzor Tsarnaev, said he would leave for the US to visit one son and lay the other to rest.