Who are the Real Boston Marathon Bombers? Part 1
Who are the Real Boston Marathon Bombers? Part 2Before He Was Killed by Law Enforcement Employees, Boston Marathon Bombing Muslim Patsy, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, Shouted, "We Didn't Do It," and His Brother and U.S. Citizen, Dzhokhar, While Hiding in a Boat from the Government Manhunt, Wrote: "US Government is Killing Our Innocent Civilians"
Mindful that this affidavit may be filed or displayed as an offer of proof with her authorization in public proceedings contemplated by the laws of the United States of America, and in reliance upon Title 28 of the United States Code, Section 1746, Dzhamaly Tsarnaev deposes and says:
I, Tsarnaev Dzhamaly Maazovich, born in 1954 year in the town of Tokmak, Kyrgyzstan, and at the present time residing in Russia, being the citizen of the Russian Federation. I am the paternal uncle of Anzor Tsarnaev, the father of Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. Anzor’s father, Zaindi Tsarnaev, now deceased, was my (first) cousin.
The verdict reached by the jury at the Boston court trial against Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was unexpected for me and my relatives. From the first day, we possess multiple facts of the absolute non-involvement of the Tsarnaev brothers, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar, in the bombings at the Boston marathon.
For two years, starting from June 2013 to April 2015, me, personally, and members of my family, brother Said-Hussein, sisters Roza and Taus, as well as family members of Anzor Tsarnaev, repeatedly talked at the meetings that took place during the visits of defense lawyers appointed by the USA government to protect the legal interests of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev in criminal proceedings. The lawyers and their invited experts to this case, as they introduced themselves to us, had visited Grozny (Chechnya) and Makhachkala (Dagestan), at the least fourteen times.
I had repeatedly personally met and talked with them. On some occasions, during the talks with lawyers and members of their team, I had participated together with Anzor and my other relatives. For two years, our meetings and the contents of conversations were, it seemed to me, of a strange nature. Representatives of the defense team for Dzhokhar were collecting information about everything: our way of life, our lives, the origin of the Tsarnaev family tree, where we work, what contacts we have. They were interested in everything, except the facts proving the innocence of the Tsarnaev brothers, to which we had unsuccessfully tried to draw the attention of defense, because we were openly ignored. Representatives of the defense team were confident in the innocence of the brothers, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar; in particular, the lead defense lawyer Judy Clarke herself agreed, adding in the conversation, "we know it – they are innocent."
From the words of my brother, Said-Khussein Tsarnaev, I learned that on August 7, 2014 (it was their second visit to Grozny; the first visit took place in June 2014), at the meeting with representatives of the defense team, which took place at the hotel "Grozny – City", Charlene, who presented herself as an independent investigator involved in the case by Dzhokhar's lawyers; Jane, presented as a social worker and psychologist; and Olga (a translator from New Jersey, who arrived with the team), translating the conversation, openly admitted to my brother that they knew that Dzhokhar and Tamerlan were not guilty of the bombings, and with this they were apologizing that the Tsarnaevs have had to endure the tragedy involving criminal allegations.
My last personal conversation with the representative of Dzhokhar's lawyers team, Alicia, introduced to me as assistant to the state-appointed defense attorney, during which I had to speak through an interpreter named Elena, a Russian by birth and supposedly residing in the United States, took place on April 14, 2015, in Moscow.
The details of that meeting are as follows: on April 10, 2015, I was in the city of Orel, where I live with my wife and children, and Elena called me on behalf of Alicia and requested to come on April 13, 2015 to Moscow for a very serious conversation. The distance from Orel to Moscow is 420 kilometers (c. 260 miles), but considering that the conversation was promised to be "very serious", thereby suggesting that it may also be important for Dzhokhar, I took the journey to meet with Alicia on the specified date.
I had met with Alicia and Elena on April 14, 2015 at noon in the hall of the "Ararat – Hyatt" hotel. Later we moved to a cafe on the second floor. Our conversation lasted around 40 minutes. And suddenly Alicia said to me, "Dzhokhar's guilt has been proven by the prosecution in court, please convince Dzhokhar to take the blame for the bombings in the marathon so that he is not given the death penalty." I was shocked by her revelation and request, and said, "what are you talking about, we and you both know that the boys are innocent and there is a lot of conclusive evidence of it, and representatives of the defense, who visited earlier in Dagestan and Chechnya, admitted to us that they had known themselves that Tamerlan and Dzhokhar were not involved in the Boston bombings." To this Alicia had stated, "If Dzhokhar does not accept the guilt and does not express remorse, then the court will issue him a death sentence, however Dzhokhar is insisting upon his own, that he is ready to die rather than allow for Tamerlan to be blamed for the bombings and to plead guilty for himself and his brother."
I knew from Dzhokhar's parents at the same time in March-April 2015 that Dzhokhar had told them that he was ready to die, however his mother, Zubeidat, presented this readiness to us in her own interpretation, as it sounded in her words "he is ready to die for the sake of Allah", hiding the true reason behind Dzhokhar's words, giving his words and actions some sign of religiosity.
Only after talking to Alicia it became perfectly clear to me why Dzhokhar says such words. I realized that, unfortunately, Dzhokhar's mother did not fully divulge what might be hidden behind the words of "Dzhokhar's readiness to die." Now I am convinced that Dzhokhar, knowing of his innocence in the bombings, having lost any hope for a fair trial, seeing inaction and complete lack of legal defense, insists upon his readiness to face a death sentence rather than accept the blame for the bombings, which neither he nor his brother had committed.
I asked Alicia to explain why the defense was not using in the court proceedings the commonly known facts of the non-involvement and innocence of the Tsarnaev brothers. I stated that it should be known to her that in the USA many innocent people were sentenced to life imprisonment and given the death penalty, who after 30 and 40 years had been exonerated from crimes and released free, and to avoid this happening to Dzhokhar, I called on her of the necessity to involve all potential witnesses, whom under various pretexts the FBI had isolated, so that they are not allowed to testify in favor of the defendant Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. At that same moment I had admitted to Alicia that we have collected many documents proving the complete innocence of Tamerlan and Dzhokhar and that we intended to present them to the court. Alicia asked if I could show her these documents. I categorically refused to show them, and said that I shall present them in the right place and at the right time. After this she asked, "How do you intend to bring them into the USA?" At that time, US visas were supposedly being arranged for the Tsarnaevs, including myself; in any case, Alicia on the previous visit in February 2015 had collected from us the information, passport details and photos of me and my sister, Roza Tsarnaeva. Later, Alicia repeatedly consulted with us, saying "you will be able to travel, your documents will soon be ready, do not refuse the trip." We did not intend to abandon the trip, as we were determined to take part in the trial by presenting the evidence of the brothers' innocence through Dzhokhar's lawyers.
After my conversation with Alicia held on April 14, 2015 in Moscow, the Tsarnaevs were refused entry visas to the United States for participation in the court trial. It is exactly for this reason that not a single representative of the Tsarnaev family had been present at the court trial in Boston.
Date ___________________
Signature ___________________________ Dzhamaly Tsarnaev
EMERGENCY! FBI Boston Covery-up Bigger Than 9/11
Five weeks after the Boston Marathon bombings, "new details" emerged, with police claiming that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was killed on Laurel Street in Watertown, Massachusetts around 1:00 AM on April 19, 2013, after he "walked toward law enforcement officers, firing his gun until he appeared to run out of bullets." Although there were many police vehicles on Laurel Street in Watertown, no footage from their dashboard cameras was released to the public. It was never reported whether or not any police officers on the scene were wearing body cameras. The shootout at Watertown lasted less than 10 minutes, with explosive devices going off in addition to gunfire.
UPDATE: Naked man arrest in Watertown, MA related to Boston Marathon Bombings
CNN was at the scene, as was photojournalist Gabe Ramirez (video above). He said he was on Nichols and Dexter Streets, along with a couple of other journalists, and it was a chaotic scene, with police from a multitude of agencies, all with their weapons drawn, pointing at a vehicle that they couldn't see from their vantage point. They were screaming for somebody to put his hands up and to get out of the car. At some point, Tamerlan did do that because they could then see that the officers were relaxing. They ordered him to take off all his clothes, including his underwear. He and the other journalists still couldn't see the car or the suspect while this was happening. They first saw Tamerlan when police brought him to a police car, and they could see that Tamerlan was completely naked and handcuffed from behind when they put him into a police car. Some time later several FBI agents arrived. Tamerlan was put in pants and a jacket by then but they could see that he was still barefoot when FBI agents removed him from the police vehicle. The FBI agents walked him over to a building and put him up against it as they shined flashlights in his face, and it looked like they were taking photos of him. Then they walked him back to the police vehicle and started to question him for 5 to 10 minutes, before putting him back into the vehicle. The report abruptly ends without getting all the details from Gabe; however, he said he had captured what he witnessed on film. That footage was never released to the public and was not presented at Dzhokhar's trial.
The following is an excerpt from the transcript of CNN's live coverage of the scene in Watertown, which aired on April 19, 2013 - 02:00 AM ET.
GRIFFIN: Gabe Ramirez, a photo journalist, arrived in time to see that arrest taking place. A suspect, a white male suspect, was told to strip completely naked. Those are the pictures we have. And we are not showing to you them because we basically have to blur certain parts of that. That person is marched, escorted by four police officers into a police vehicle and escorted away in that police vehicle. That is how that arrest took place.New Witness of Naked Suspect (Marathon Bombing: Seth Mnookin)
Go ahead. I'm just hearing this -- this is coming from Gabe Ramirez, photojournalist, at another vantage point says that this suspect has just been taken out of the car by FBI agents who are on the scene and are questioning him. And are questioning him. Are they in another car?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: No, they were on the street.
GRIFFIN: They were on the street. Is the man still naked?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes. They've got him on the sidewalk and he's still naked. [This contradicts what Gabe said live at the scene in the video above.]
GRIFFIN: The man is on the sidewalk, still naked, now being questioned by FBI agents. This is coming to us from Gabe Ramirez, a photojournalist from CNN, who has a different vantage point than I do, Jake.
TAPPER: Just to recap, the same individual who was arrested earlier, who was stripped naked, presumably out of precaution to make sure he didn't have any explosives on him, the Massachusetts police having said that there were explosives used in the incident in Watertown this evening, but the first suspect to whom you're referring, who was apprehended, he was taken out of a car and questioned again, that's what you're saying, according to Gabe Ramirez?
GRIFFIN: Yes. Gabe, this is the same exact person, right? Yes, he was taken out of the car. He was questioned by federal agents -- Gabe, stop me if I'm saying anything inaccurate. He was placed against a wall and he was photographed by these FBI agents. Appears to be photographed. OK, they had -- flashlight in his face. And has that questioning ended now, Gabe? Put him back in the very same car. It was a Boston police car? Can't tell but appears to be a local police car. So this suspect, and this suspect is still in that local police car? All right, hold on.
JULIETTE KAYYEM, CNN NATIONAL SECURITY ANALYST (via phone): Well, just basically watching and reading and passing by probably about 30 police cars from transit police -- excuse me, transit police, state police, Boston police, Cambridge police, all of them. Obviously, something big is going on. And what we have to remember, there's three different incidents. There's the marathon attack, with the city very much on edge and a strong presence in the city. Then you have a police officer shot at MIT in Cambridge. And the geography is that the MIT campus -- the part of campus where that is actually not that far from commonwealth avenue, Boylston Avenue, those areas where the marathon is run. It's probably no more than a half mile. A police officer being killed is a should be and is a big deal, so you would see lots and lots of activity.
But as Jake Tapper was saying, you wouldn't necessarily see federal activity because these are local and state events. It's probably right now because there's so much federal presence here that anything like this would generate a lot of activity. You then have a third incident and we can't tie yet is whether the MIT killing and what's going on in Watertown, which is not far but not really that close to MIT, whether that is actually related.
CHURCH: That was certainly being reported earlier on our affiliate WCVB. If we just go back over the scene there because it's interesting, you are right in the middle of it there in Watertown. Describe the situation. What is the scene? Is it still chaotic?
GRIFFIN: The scene is just like this. Police cars coming in, police cars coming out. Officers showing up, officers leaving. Police with guns, police without guns. Three people I've seen have been wearing FBI attire. That's it, three, out of many, I would say almost 100 or more police officers who are from the local departments. There are many local departments here. Boston, Cambridge, state police, transit police, but they -- the general grouping is they are local. I have not seen a huge federal presence here at all. You can draw attention, you know, you're assumption is either way right now. But right now this seems like a very, very big local police presence here and not a whole lot of federal people.
Another witness, award-winning journalist and author, Seth Mnookin, saw police arrest a naked and uninjured Tamerlan (video above). He said there were well over 100 police in tactical gear, at least a half dozen different agencies, including the FBI, multiple SWAT trucks and bomb squad trucks, and officers in camouflage gear. Law enforcement immediately told the press that there was a logical connection between the killing of MIT police officer Sean Collier, the carjacking, and the suspects being surrounded in Watertown.
Another witness to the shootout in Watertown called into a radio station and said that she and others with her in her home on Dexter Street saw the first suspect (Tamerlan) get hit (not run-over) by a police SUV and then after he was hit get shot multiple times, and minutes later an ambulance arrived and they put him into it. She said she did not see the first suspect (Tamerlan) fire a gun. She said that from the injuries he received, he was probably dead when he was put into the ambulance.
Patriots Day (2016) : Original footages? And death of the old...
by heisenberg12
» Sat Jan 14 2017 20:29:26|
IMDb member since January 2015
Post Edited: Sat Jan 14 2017 20:40:47
Actually, related to this, I watched the whole live news unfold that night and at one point, live cameras caught a butt naked Tamerlan handcuffed and being escorted and placed in a police vehicle. Even the reporter covering it right there said that was the suspect and he was taken in custody. It really looked just like him. You can look up some of the footage on YouTube.
Next thing you know, sort of like a cover up, the story changed and they said that suspect was deceased and that the handcuffed guy wasn't him; it was just a civilian bystander who happened to be walking down the same street at what, 2 in the morning?
So, point is, there is still a good chance that they just said his brother ran him over for whatever reason, maybe just to humiliate them more and look stupid, but I thought they could have apprehended him and been so mad at these two, especially the older one, that rather than lock him up, they just killed him somewhere. Who knows, maybe they were so mad, they ran him over too.
I thought their justification might have been that it was an act of war and fair game when they started throwing IED's at the LE officers and also that he killed a cop, the MIT guy. I was actually hoping the film would shock at the end and add that surprise twist as a possibility, which could have made it very powerful and brought up how the media can twist and cover up what actually takes place and ideas of justice in such events.
It was less than three years ago and I recall it like yesterday.
Anyone who followed live footage that night saw Tamerlan being escorted alive in a police vehicle, unless you believe twin lookalike was walking the same street at that moment at 1-2 in the morning.
by roncell
» Sun Jan 15 2017 22:03:50
IMDb member since March 2006
Post Edited: Sun Jan 15 2017 22:06:34
So why don't you grow a brain and check it out for yourself. Or better yet, just check out this link...
http://beforeitsnews.com/terrorism/2013/04/in-pictures-questions-the-media-wont-ask-about-the-boston-bombings-2445966.html
I too saw the media coverage showing the older Tsarnev brother walking around in police custody prior to his untimely demise. This was NOT depicted in the movie as it happened. Not everything is a conspiracy theory... at least for those of us who don't appreciate having our news spoon-fed to us.
by MonsterJoe
» Mon Jan 16 2017 11:27:05
IMDb member since October 2003
Heisenberg12 is correct I watched the live footage that same night and saw the older brother was made to strip down completely naked and was put in the cruiser. There is still footage of this on you tube. I'm not sure what happened after he got in the car but I have a hard time believing anything associated with this event.
by heisenberg12
» Tue Jan 17 2017 00:03:43
IMDb member since January 2015
So you're giving in to the notion that a Tamerlan twin lookalike just so happened to be walking the streets of Watertown at 1-2 in the morning....Okay. That's fine. Great odds your're going up against but okay...
The young man in the video who the live cnn reporter even said was "the suspect taken into custody" was a spitting image also of tamerlan. This really happened and isn't conspiracy at all. If you want to believe a twin lookalike was right there at the scene in Watertown at the same time, then it could be. It looks like a quiet suburb but I'm not from there so maybe people were out walking around. It was Wednesday or Thursday night though and it's not new York city, the city that never sleeps. anyway, maybe it wasn't him, but it you saw it live or if you watch the cnn video and other footage, it looks exactly like him. if you watched in real time live, you would know more because anyone who did watched the reporter and he interviewed a few LE officers and they said that was the suspect. It was live news. It is what it is. Research and believe what you want.
Well I saw it on CNN so...the reporter even said it. That's why it was striking.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VS8CAUFFSMU&app=desktop
as pronounced dead at Beth Israel Deaconness Medical Center, and that "doctors there said the suspect was in cardiac arrest when he arrived, with multiple gunshot wounds and trauma on his trunk from an explosion." The photo of his deceased body (see Who are the Real Boston Marathon Bombers? Part 2) matches this early report, not the later reports claiming Dzhokhar ran over Tamerlans's body with a carjacked SUV.
There are no witnesses or surveillance footage of the alleged carjacking, but there is audio from a police scanner, with officers saying that at least one suspect was in an SUV stolen from the State police:
"We have the gold cars in route to Watertown. I think they have a stolen truck from the State police. Be advised, another shot being fired in our stolen SUV from the State police. Copy, stolen SUV from State police... We're on the area of Laurel Street, suspects are here. We have a report there are explosives here on the scene. Definitely hand grenades and automatic gunfire. Dexter and Laurel."911WhatYouMightHaveMissed reported on a recording of police radio as the events unfolded, which indicates that after Tamerlan was wounded by an explosive device and shot multiple times by police (which coincides with the early USA TODAY report), Dzhokhar, in an attempt to escape, stole a police SUV that was at the Watertown scene (or police were confused and he tried to escape in the stolen SUV) :
"Shots fired Dexter Street, loud explosives in between houses. Stolen police SUV. Plenty of officers here so expand perimeter. We have one in custody at gunpoint. We are at Spruce and Laurel. Need description of suspect at large. We're headed to the hospital with one of the suspects at Beth Israel."Dun “Danny” Meng's story includes an unbelievable confession from Tamerlan:
“He asked me a question, like, ‘Do you know the Boston explosion on Monday?’ I said, ‘yes.’ He said, you know, ‘I did that. And I just killed a policeman in Cambridge.’”Sibel Edmonds on the Boston Bombing: The US roots of "Chenchen"
Taking the facts above into consideration, the logical conclusion is that Tamerlan, after being forced to strip naked, was taken alive, handcuffed and put into a police vehicle. He then was given pants and a jacket. When the FBI arrived on the scene a few minutes later, they escorted him from the police vehicle to the side of a building, where they photographed him. They then returned him to the vehicle and questioned him for 5 to 10 minutes. At some point, he was removed from the police car and was hit, not run over, by a police SUV that Dzhokhar stole from the scene in an attempt to escape (or the police were confused and he was in the stolen SUV). An unarmed Tamerlan was then shot multiple times and was wounded by an explosive device, after being questioned, naked, in Watertown by the FBI..
The story told by Danny about Tamerlan confessing to shooting the MIT officer is a concoction by the FBI. Also concocted by the FBI is Stephen Silva's testimony that he loaned Dzhokhar the Ruger P95 9mm pistol used to kill MIT police officer Sean Collier (see comments to this blog post on Silva's plea deal with the feds in exchange for his testimony at Tsarnaev's trial). Neither of the Tsarnaev brothers had a gun and neither of them shot Collier (see comments to this blog post about the 7-11 robbery). This is confirmed by MIT's online edition of The Tech, which reported on April 18, 2013, that the gun used to shoot Collier was recovered at the scene of the shooting, and the fact the authorities claimed that the Ruger allegedly used by the Tsarnaevs to shoot Collier was also used to shoot officers in Watertown.
MIT police officer shot near Stata Center, confirmed deadThe shootout on Laurel Street in Watertown was one-sided (as was the shootout later that day at the boat Dzhokhar was hiding in), all coming from various law enforcement agencies, including the FBI.
CORRECTION TO THIS ARTICLE:A previous version of this story incorrectly stated the location of the shooting. The officer was shot outside, between the Stata Center and Building 76, not inside.
By Greg Steinbrecher, STAFF REPORTER; LAST UPDATED AT 12:27 A.M. 4/19/13
MIT's, The Tech, Online Edition
Shortly before 10:30 p.m. Thursday evening, an MIT police officer was shot near the Stata Center, and has been confirmed dead by the Cambridge Police Department. Though the weapon used to shoot the officer has been recovered, the shooter is still at large.
A postdoctoral student working in Building 76 called the MIT Police at about 10:25 p.m. to report loud sounds, possibly gunshots. The injured officer was found at 10:31 p.m. and was transported to Massachusetts General Hospital.
The area around Building 32 was quickly cordoned off from pedestrians. In a faster response than other recent emergency situations, MIT’s alert system was active within 30 minutes; the first report The Tech has been able to confirm at time of publication is 10:55 p.m. By that point, social media had exploded with warnings to stay away from the area around the Stata Center.
Ibragim Todashev is an example of what could happen if you don't cooperate with the feds. On May 22, 2013, five weeks after the Boston Marathon bombings, Todashev was shot and killed by FBI agents in his Orlando apartment after allegedly admitting that he and Tamerlan killed three of Tamerlan’s friends in what appeared to be a drug deal gone wrong in 2011.
One of Dzhokhar's friend was targeted by the feds and reached a plea deal to shorten his sentence. In July 2014, after telling police during a November 2013 marijuana bust, “I smoke a lot of weed every day because my best friend was the bomber,” Stephen Silva, a childhood friend of Dzhokhar, was arrested for dealing heroin and for possession of a firearm with a partially obliterated serial number (the Ruger 9mm pistol used to kill Collier). He pleaded guilty to the drug and gun charges in a plea deal with federal prosecutors. The deal included him testifying at Dzhokhar's trial that he loaned him the gun used to kill MIT Officer Sean Collier. In exchange for this testimony, the 40-year sentence he faces could be reduced to five years (see the comment on this blog post starting at 8:38 AM on May 14 for history on the gun).
Prior to July 2014, one of the lingering questions since the Boston Marathon bombings was, "Where did the suspects get the gun that authorities say they used to kill a university police officer?" In July 2014, when Silva was indicted, investigators immediately disclosed to the press that Silva supplied his friend Dzhokhar with the weapon. A July 23, 2014 report quoted anonymous sources: "The 9 mm Ruger pistol described in the indictment is the same handgun that was used to kill Massachusetts Institute of Technology police officer Sean Collier during the manhunt for the bombing suspects, according to the two people, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the investigation."
Attorneys for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev (who goes by the name "Jahar") argued in court motions that his older brother Tamerlan had been approached by the FBI to become an informant in the Boston region. The court request said “the FBI made more than one visit to talk with Tamerlan and his parents, Anzor and Zubeidat, to question Tamerlan about his internet searches and to ask him to be an informant, reporting on the Chechen and Muslim community,” according to WBUR Boston. RT.com reported on March 29, 2014 that in court motions the defense speculated that Tamerlan may have misinterpreted the intention of the conversations with the FBI, which may have acted as a “stressor that increased his paranoia and distress.”
Adam Goldman, and others at the Associated Press, attempted to piece together the story of Tamerlan. According to their article, family members said in the years before the Boston Marathon bombings, Tamerlan fell under the influence of a new friend, a slightly older, heavyset bald man with a long reddish beard who was a Muslim convert. Known by the Tsarnaev family only as Misha, he steered a religiously apathetic Tamerlan toward a strict strain of Islam. Under Misha's tutelage, Tamerlan gave up boxing and stopped studying music, his family said. He began opposing the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He turned to websites and literature claiming that the CIA was behind the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and Jews controlled the world.
Elmirza Khozhugov, who was married to Tamerlan and Dzhokhar's sister Ailina, testified at Dzhokhar's trial on May 6, 2015, from the U.S. Embassy in Kazakhstan. He said that when he was still married to Ailina, the couple spent a lot of time at the Tsarnaev family apartment in Cambridge. He testified that Misha, a friend of Tamerlan, taught him about Islam, suggested books to read, offered his own views. CNN reported on Khozhugov's testimony:
Tamerlan once introduced Khozhugov to an Armenian friend who was a convert to Islam. His name was Misha, and he was a mentor of sorts to Tamerlan, Khozhugov said. Zubeidat Tsarnaeva [Tamerlan and Dzhokhar's mother] welcomed Misha, who engaged in conversations about religion and politics. Tamerlan started to change during his friendship with Misha. He quit boxing and an acting class, Khozhugov said. He lost interest in music and began talking about conspiracy theories he picked up on the Internet. "He particularly told me that Misha told him it was not appropriate in Islam to box and that is why he stopped," he said.Walter Katz, writing for The Week, commented on Misha being an FBI handler who radicalized Tameralan:
"It would be disturbing if Tamerlan Tsarnaev — and by extension his brother — was the product of an abandoned government sting operation, for we will never know if Tamerlan would have set on down the path of radicalism without the guiding hand of the red-bearded Misha."Several members of the extended Tsarnaev family raised the possibility that a specific person was responsible for Tamerlan’s radicalization. Some accused the mysterious figure named “Misha” of encouraging Tamerlan’s zealousness. “It started in 2009. And it started right there, in Cambridge,” Tamerlan’s uncle, Ruslan Tsarni, said after the attacks. “This person just took his brain. He just brainwashed him completely.” Zubeidat, the brothers mother, explicitly credited Misha with opening her eyes to Islam: “I wasn’t praying until he prayed in our house, so I just got really ashamed that I am not praying, being a Muslim, being born Muslim,” she said. “I am not praying. Misha, who converted, was praying.” These accusations set off a frenzied search for the Armenian convert to Islam.
In late April 2013, FBI sources said that they believed they had located Misha and interviewed him, but journalists were unable to track him down. However, in April 2013, New York Review of Books journalist Christian Caryl tracked down Misha, the Armenian Muslim convert accused of brainwashing Tamerlan. Although there is no photo available online for Misha, whose full name is Mikhail Allakhverdov, he was described in April 2013 as a chubby 39-year-old man of medium height with a thin, reddish-blond beard who lived with his elderly parents in an modest, tiny apartment in a lower-middle-class neighborhood in West Warwick, Rhode Island. Allakhverdov's family — his father is an Armenian Christian and his mother is Ukrainian — reportedly moved to the U.S. from Azerbaijan's capital of Baku in the early 90s to escape growing persecution of Armenian Christians there.
Allakhverdov told Christian Caryl that he had known Tamerlan in Boston, where he lived until about 2009 or 2010, and that he had not had any contact with him since. Allakhverdov denied brainwashing the 26-year-old suspect, as alleged by the Tsarnaev's uncle Ruslan Tsarni. He denied having ever met the family members who were accusing him of radicalizing Tamerlan. "I wasn't his teacher. If I had been his teacher, I would have made sure he never did anything like this," Allakhverdov told Caryl. He confirmed he was a Muslim convert and said he has been cooperating with the FBI. "I gave them [FBI] my computer and my phone and everything they wanted to show I haven't done anything. They said they are about to return them to me. The agents who talked to me told me they are about to close my case," Allakhverdov said. He was eventually cleared by the FBI in the bomb plot.
The Tsarnaevs had rare family connections inside the American "deep state" that got their asylum application some special string-pulling. The only reporter who followed up on the deep state link [the state within a state, the shadow government, a hybrid entity of public and private institutions, which rules the U.S.] is Daniel Hopsicker of Mad Cow Morning News. In "‘Uncle Ruslan’ aided terrorists from CIA official’s home," he seems to demonstrate that the Congress of Chechen International Organizations was registered in 1995 by Ruslan Tsarni (the Tsarnaev's father's brother, who early in the investigation called them losers — see Who are the Real Boston Marathon Bombers? Part 2) out of the house of his then father-in-law Graham Fuller, the former vice chairman of the CIA's National Intelligence Council. And Hopsicker has a copy of a letter suggesting that Uncle Ruslan's NGO played middleman to deliver 2,500 pairs of combat boots to Chechen rebels from the Al-Qaeda front Benevolence International. They went to Sheik Fathi, a Jordanian of Chechen descent, who had spent 10 years fighting in Afghanistan. Since the postman would presumably deliver mail for Uncle Ruslan's operation to Mr. Fuller's mailbox, it's hard to imagine that Fuller, a Central Asian expert, was oblivious to the organization's general existence, although it's hard to say how much more deeply he was involved. [Uncle Ruslan's org funneled military supplies from Al-Qaeda to Chechen rebels]
During Dzhokhar's trial, the prosecution diverted public attention from the role others may have played in the attack. Dzhokhar did not take the stand on his behalf; therefore, the public was not able to learn more about his brother’s involvement with the feds. Instead, Dzhokhar’s attorneys admitted his guilt in opening and closing arguments. According to Lara Turner, his attorneys scuttled any attempt to use the trial as a truth-seeking mission:
The FBI has asserted that the Tsarnaev brothers were never sources for the agency nor did it attempt to recruit them as sources. But, after recent independent investigations, it’s no longer the purview of skeptics to wonder about the true nature of the FBI’s involvement with two young, arguably down-on-their-luck Muslims hailing from a region — Chechnya — rife with turmoil. In fact, the FBI commonly seeks out these types of young men for help as informants and to lead stings.Researcher Trevor Aaronson, author of The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI’s Manufactured War on Terrorism, says that nearly half of the 508 defendants prosecuted for terrorism-related incidents between 9/11 and 2011 were prompted to act by informants — who were paid as much as $100,000 per assignment. Sting operations resulted in the prosecutions of 158 defendants. Among the most high-profile plots of the last decade investigated by Aaronson, only three lacked FBI involvement. According to Aaronson:
In the days leading up to jury deliberations in the Boston bombing trial — two New York women were arrested and charged with conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction, citing the Boston Marathon bombings as inspiration. However, a criminal complaint revealed that an undercover law enforcement informant devised and facilitated the alleged plot. The complaint provided little evidence that the two women knew how to make a bomb before they were introduced to the informant.
The sting is typically started with the FBI assigning an informant, "posing as a radical," to approach "the target." As the relationship develops, "the operative will propose a plot, provide explosives, even lead the target in a fake oath to Al Qaeda. Once enough incriminating information has been gathered, there's an arrest — and a press conference announcing another foiled plot." The question always remains, though, to what degree the plots come about from the target's own mind rather than through the machinations of the informant/agent provocateur.Author and journalist Masha Gessen ponders the question of a cover-up in her book about the case, The Brothers: The Road to an American Tragedy, released on April 7, 2015. Gessen suggests that the FBI deliberately kept police at arm’s length as they were pursuing the brothers “because it needed to ensure that no other law enforcement got to Tamerlan Tsarnaev before the FBI had captured — or killed — him. In other words, the explanation that best fits the facts is a cover-up.”
Scott Creighton asked the question: Why would the FBI need to enlist our help to identify someone they fully investigated in 2011? The following is an excerpt from his report.
If you take the statements made by the family members of the Tsarnaev brothers separately you come to the understanding that something is horribly wrong with the official story of what happened at the Boston marathon bombing. You just can’t put your finger on it.The government threatened the Tsarnaevs' associates with deportation or prosecution on trumped up charges if they didn't cooperate in framing them.
But if you take the time to consider all of their statements together as a whole, alongside the FBI’s own acknowledgement of their investigation into the older brother, Tamerlan, and then recall what we know about the Craft International assets on site under the cover of being there in an official capacity, what you come to conclude is that it looks like the FBI used a confidential informant (CI) to lure the brothers to the finish line of the Boston marathon so they could be set up as the patsies for this false flag event. Not to have them be complicit in the bombing but just to put them in the wrong place at the right time so they could be framed for this attack.
Using CIs to manipulate”terrorism” patsies is standard operating procedure for the FBI.
The first thing to remember is that this is the task of the FBI these days. They use CIs, people with criminal charges hanging over their heads, to lure unsuspecting, often half-witted dupes, into entrapment plots that the FBI can then foil and claim they saved us from a terrorist attack they themselves made. There are multiple examples of even the mainstream media exposing this fact on both sides of the artificial ideological divide in the press. Glenn Greenwald and many others have written about this standard operating procedure of the FBI much better than I have and to more critical acclaim. But perhaps the most well known example of this being exposed even by the main stream is the Judge Napolitano segment on Fox News (see "FBI Fake Terror Plots History" video below).
FBI Fake Terror Plots History: Judge Napolitano
The constitutionality of this practice is not up for debate any longer. What the FBI is doing as an institution is immoral and unethical. The FBI essentially hire the dregs of society with your tax dollars to go out and effectively find dupes around which they can manufacture a terrorist plot. These patsies effectively become contractors for the Justice Department and are told to produce said plots for cash and freedom. They are threatened with prosecution of whatever crimes they have committed.
On all accounts, from every angle, it is one of the most despicable misuses of federal authority one can imagine in a free society. The fact that it happens routinely in their ongoing domestic “war on terror” is not up for debate. It is not a controversial “conspiracy theory.” It is well documented fact. The FBI manipulates targets through the use of CIs.
So when the spotter [in the case of the Boston Marathon, an FBI agent at Whiskey's Steakhouse on Boylston Street] confirmed the Tsarnaev brothers had arrived, the operation was set in motion.
The FBI distanced themselves from the two at the start by pretending to need us to identify the boys, but as soon as the mother mentioned that the FBI had known them, they had a press release ready to go, as if they just remembered. This behavior in itself is more than incriminating.
With confirmation from the belligerent uncle [Ruslan Tsarni] that mysterious “mentors” were guiding and using the brothers [see more about the uncle from Scott Creighton's report at the end of this blog post], I don’t think we can come to any other conclusion than the FBI sent the Tsarnaevs there to take the blame.
Who were these outside influences? Were there FBI CIs [the mysterious Misha] assigned to work Tamerlan as a potential asset to be flipped into some future entrapment plot?
The FBI had made contact with the Tsarnaev family, had investigated them, and had continued contact thereafter. And the time frame fits with what the uncle was saying.
Could the FBI have green-lighted the Tsarnaev brothers as potential dupes, just like they have with so many other young men in the recent past, and then had their CI set them up to take the fall for this staged, mass-casualty event?
All it would have required was for the CI to call up Tamerlan and invite him and his brother to a late lunch downtown [at the Forum restaurant?], telling them to meet him near the finish line at a certain time [Dzhokhar stopped at the Forum while Tamerlan continued down the street toward the finish line, stopping in front of Lenscrafters]. That’s it. And there they are.
When you look at what he is saying, about knowing someone was influencing the young man, and you look at what the FBI did during the investigation and their history of setting people up as fall guys for their own plots and plans, you have to come away with at least a strong suspicion that these two men were handled by an FBI CI and brought to their destiny with destruction to serve a certain role in all of this.
Craft International operatives were in position waiting but what they needed was a patsy, much like the ones the FBI are so good at creating. And after all, it’s the FBI who will be investigating anyway.
Chinese national Dun "Danny" Meng most certainly was threatened to give false testimony. Meng, who was, and still is, in the U.S. on a work visa, testified for the prosecution.Before he was murdered by law enforcement employees on April 19, 2013, Tamerlan Tsarnaev shouted, "We didn't do it!" (video below).
The 911 dispatcher who took the call at 12:19 AM on April 19, 2013, immediately called Mercedes' GPS tracker system, and they gave 911 the location of the Mercedes, which was Dexter Street in Watertown. However, it wasn't until 30-40 minutes later, around 1:00 AM, that the Tsarvaevs were surrounded on Laurel Street by 100 law enforcement officers, including SWAT teams and bomb squad teams, from a multitude of agencies. The Tsarnaevs were under constant surveillance by the FBI, so the FBI knew exactly where they were when this was all going down and how to arrange for them to come to Watertown to meet Tamerlan's confidential informant.
So it took the FBI 30 minutes to work out their preliminary plan to frame the Tsarnaevs for the crimes (7-Eleven robbery and MIT shooting) starting at 10 PM on April 18, 2013, and to wrap it up dramatically with their capture in Watertown. The Tsarnaevs didn't have any guns or bombs. The shootout was all one-sided by LEOs. LEOs released to the press immediately, as the events were still unfolding in Watertown, that the Tsarnaevs were responsible for the 7-11 robbery, MIT murder, and Mercedes carjacking. However, 7-11 foiled their plans by announcing to the press that a 5' 11" Hispanic man who looked nothing like the Tsarnaevs robbed the store, so they had to drop that accusation. Margaret Chabris, the director of corporate communication at 7- Eleven, said the surveillance video of the crime released to the press by authorities was not taken at a 7-Eleven and that the suspect that did rob the 7-Eleven does not look like Tamerlan or Dzhokhar Tsarnaev: "The suspect in the photos for that particular 7-Eleven robbery looks nothing like the suspects," Chabris says. "The police or someone made a mistake. Someone was confused."
Over the months and years leading up to Dzhokhar's trial, the FBI fine-tuned its story and coerced fake testimony from the Tsarnaevs' associates by threatening deportation and imprisonment on false charges.
The brothers were wanted by the FBI, yet the only things found among their possessions in Watertown were a crudely-assembled remote control transmitter, Tamerlan’s high school diploma, a Russian-language document featuring a bearded photo of Tamerlan, a laptop computer [this must have been Tamerlan's because Dzhokhar's was in his dorm room at UMass Dartmouth], an i-Pod, a cell phone, a thumb drive, a GPS device, chapstick, tire pressure gauges, a package of paper towels, an opened bottle of Gaterade, bandaids, and an ink pen [and a pair of planted gloves with MIT officer Collier's blood on them]. Also at the scene in Watertown were two backpacks: Tamerlan's backpack contained bullets leftover from their trip to a gun range a month earlier, and Dzhokhar's backpack contained fireworks leftover from Spring Break at the end of March.
The Tsarnaves allegedly were fleeing to escape the FBI manhunt yet they didn't pack any clothing or personal items, not even toothbrushes. And in Tamerlan's wallet (found on the back seat of their Honda Civic) was only $19. What happened to the $800 they allegedly stole from Meng by withdrawing it from his checking account via an ATM [the timestamp on the withdrawal was 11:19 PM; an hour later, at 12:19 AM, Deng escaped]? There was no mention at trial if Dzhokhar had a wallet when captured and there was no explanation of the missing $800.
From the movie, "A Few Good Men:"
"After Dawson and Downey's arrest, Santiago's room was inventoried. Four pairs of camouflage pants, three khaki shirts, boots. Four pairs of socks... Why hadn't Santiago packed? He was asleep at midnight, and you say he had a flight in six hours. Yet everything he owned was in his closet or his footlocker. For one day, you packed and made three calls. Santiago was leaving for the rest of his life. And he hadn't called a soul or packed a thing. Can you explain that?"
Why didn't the FBI release footage from the dashboard cameras of the many cop cars on the scene in Watertown where Tamerlan was killed? Instead, Andrew Kitzenberg's out of focus, dark and long-distance iPhone snapshots from a third-story window of his home were submitted into evidence. Hundreds of media outlets published his photos and his dubious descriptions of what was depicted in the images.
"Each of these pictures on this page together with the description of them are individually licensed by Andrew Kitzenberg with the requirement of attribution to Andrew Ktizenberg and a reference to his company’s website www.getonhand.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. For anyone looking to purchase 8GB BOSTON STRONG USB Wristbands from GetOnHand.com (whose proceeds will go to the One Fund Boston, Inc. to help the victims who were most affected by the Boston Marathon bombing), go here."
Ktizenberg was called by the prosecution to testify because what he says supports the government's story. He doesn't have video, just blurry snapshots. Both Andrew Kitzenberg and FBI agent David Green were involved in falsely laying the blame on Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. How convenient that Green pulled out his smartphone just in time to catch Dzhokhar running away from the second blast site. According to the Las Vegas Sun, David Green clearly is implicated in framing the brothers:
“Seconds after the bombs exploded, David Green from Jacksonville, Florida, pulled out his smart-phone and took a photo of the chaos developing a couple hundred yards in front of him — the smoke, the people running in panic.”
In addition to not releasing any footage from dashboard cameras on police vehicles, why didn't the FBI analyze the Garmin GPS found in the Tsarnaevs' Honda to confirm the brothers whereabouts that day. At trial, they presented a detailed analysis of their travels on March 6, 2013 using the Garmin GPS data, but didn't do the same for the most important days, April 15 through April 18, 2013, and all the days leading up to the bombings when they were allegedly making the bombs.
The Tsarnaev brothers arrived at the Boston Marathon on April 15, 2013 at 2:37:40 PM. Twelve minutes after they arrived, at 02:49:56 PM, the first bomb exploded (the second bomb exploded 12 seconds later, at 02:50:08 PM). According to the FBI, during the 12 minutes that the brothers walked two blocks on Boylston Street before the bombs exploded, 70 images or videos of them were captured and submitted for analysis. This is not hard to believe since there was an FBI agent on the lookout for them at the corner of Bolyston and Gloucester Streets at the exact moment they arrived, another agent taking photos of them as they stood in front of the Back Bay Social Club, and another two agents at the Forum restaurant where Dzhokhar stopped and waited for his brother, who had passed Forum a few minutes before him and had continued up the street toward the finish line, where he waited to meet his FBI confidential informant or where his confidential informant told him to leave his backpack as part of the bomb drill. Additionally, there were other agents near the finish line, capturing images of Tamerlan standing in front of Lenscrafters.
Wake Up America - The Truth about the Boston Marathon Bombings
FBI agent Christian Fierabend testified that the Fagor Elite pressure cookers used for the two bombs at the marathon on April 15, 2013, and for the two bombs on Laurel Street in Watertown on April 19, 2013, were sold exclusively by Macy's department store. Fierabend testified that 6-quart pressure cookers were used for the marathon bombs and 4-quart pressure cookers were used for the Watertown bombs (only one of the Watertown bombs was detonated). This would be a total of two 4-quart and two 6-quart Fagor pressure cookers from Macy's, for a grand total of four pressure cookers between the marathon and Watertown bombs.
Using Macy's records, Fierabend tracked every purchase in the U.S. between August 2012 and April 2013 of Fagor Elites. Of the 74 pressure cookers sold in the Northwest in that period, five were paid by cash. Three of the five cash purchases were in Massachusetts. Of the three cash purchases in Massachusetts, a 4-quart and a 6-quart pressure cooker were purchased at the same time in Saugus (conflicting coverage of the trial from another reporter via Twitter said that two were purchased in Boston and one in Saugus, and they were the 4-quart size).
Using Macy's sales record for the entire country and data from GPS devices used by the Tsarnaevs, Fierabend was able to determine when and where Tamerlan may have purchased the Fagor pressure cookers.
On January 31, 2013, Tamerlan's GPS showed a stop at Square One Mall in Saugus between 8:12 p.m. and 8:42 p.m. Macy’s records indicate that two pressure cookers were sold in Saugus at 8:38 p.m.: one 4-quart and one 6-quart Fagor Elite. The purchases were four minutes before the GPS tracked the car moving again, leaving the mall. Virtually the entire case was caught on surveillance cameras yet Fierabend testified that there was no surveillance video from Macy's or the mall (he also testified that, remarkably, there also was no surveillance video for the two Walmarts where the Tsarnaevs allegedly purchased boxes of BBs).
The prosecution presented to the jury a cash receipt for two Fagor pressure cookers bought at the Macy's in Square One Mall in Saugus. The Saugus cash receipt is dated January 31, 2013 at 8:13 PM with no name given; Fierabend acknowledges that he can't say who made the purchase. The FBI did not find any receipts for pressure cookers among the Tsarnaevs' possessions, so the receipt shown to the jury must have been generated by Macy's for the FBI (a commenter at emptywheel's website noted that he couldn’t find the Macy's pressure cooker receipt in the government’s exhibits). The FBI said that in Tamerlan's wallet were receipts for a remote control car, soldering kit, screwdriver set, $40 worth of ammunition purchased at a New Hampshire gun range which the brothers visited a few weeks before the Boston Marathon, two backpacks, and a $900 MoneyGram wired to his mother the day before the bombings.
If Tamerlan purchased the two Fagor pressure cookers in Saugus on January 31, 2013 (based on the FBI's nationwide search of purchases and a comparison of his GPS data) but four Fagor pressure cookers were discovered (two which exploded at the marathon, one which exploded in Watertown, and another one which was found intact in Watertown), who purchased the other two? Plus, two 4-quart pressure cookers allegedly purchased by Tamerlan were found in Watertown, yet the FBI has the sales record for only one. And of the two 6-quart pressure cookers bombs detonated at the marathon, only one was allegedly purchased by Tamerlan. Since the FBI had the records for all sales of the Fagor Elite pressure cookers, did they investigate this further and try to determine the purchaser of the other 6-quart pressure cookers used for one of the marathon bombs (the defense did not make these points or ask these questions at trial)?
The pressure cooker bomb that was detonated in Watertown was unlike the ones detonated at the marathon: it was the 4-quart size and it was not filled with nails, BBs, etc. An FBI bomb expert testified that the pressure cooker bomb detonated in Watertown was found embedded in the side of a car (evidence photo below): it did not explode so much as “act as a projectile,” with other pieces of it, such as the handle and lid, "found strewn about the neighborhood."
One more thing about the pressure cookers. There was part of a lid and a gasket from a pressure cooker at Tamerlan's apartment, which means there must be one more pressure cooker for which there is no record of purchase.
A year after the bombings, in May 2014, federal prosecutors said the Tsarnaev brothers might have received help in building the two bombs that exploded at the 2013 Boston Marathon, although they did not identify any potential suspects except to suggest the pair were inspired by Al Qaeda operatives overseas. In May 2014 court papers, prosecutors said Dzhokhar and Tamerlan had emptied hundreds of packages of fireworks to create fuel for the bombs. However, according to the document, no powder residue was found in Tamerlan's 800 SF apartment that he shared with his wife and two-year old daughter, no powder residue was found in Dzhokhar's dorm room which he shared with a classmate, and no powder residue was found in their three vehicles, "strongly suggesting that others had built, or at least helped the Tsarnaevs build, the bombs, and thus might have built more" explosive devices.
A year later, during Dzhokhar's trial in March 2015, the federal government changed its story. Michael Knapp — who works with the Terrorist Explosive Device Analytical Center (TEDAC) in Quantico, Virginia — testified that the bombs allegedly made by Tamerlan and Dzhokhar were “not that sophisticated.” He also stated that investigators found explosives residue in the Tamerlan's apartment on Norfolk Street in Cambridge and in their vehicles. Both of these assertions directly contradict what the public had been led to believe since the April 2013 Boston Marathon bombing — based not only on what law enforcement told the media, but also on the prosecution’s own statements. Despite these glaring discrepancies, Knapp’s testimony at trial went unchallenged by the defense.
James Henry and Lara Turner reported on the discrepancies. The following is an excerpt (click here to read the full report):
The reason for the defense’s silence seems clear. With the prosecution trying to paint the brothers as “lone wolves” who acted without any outside help, the defense has focused on saving Dzhokhar from the death penalty by blaming the defendant’s actions on older brother Tamerlan. As a result, both sides appear content to ignore the possibility that others were involved in the planning or facilitation of the bombing — even though the government once contended that this might be the case. Testimony [at Dzhokhar's trial] is a case study in how language can be twisted to gain a legal advantage, while leaving potentially significant matters of fact unexplored.
On panels inside the boat in which he hid all day after police SWAT teams, sharpshooters and FBI agents killed his brother, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev wrote (images below):
"I am jealous of my brother who has received the reward of Jannutal Firdaus (insballah) before me. I do not mourn because his soul is very much alive. God has a plan for each person. Mine was to hide in this boat and shed some light on our actions. I ask Allah to make me a shahied (iA) to allow me to return to him and be among all the righteous people in the highest levels of heaven. He who Allah guides no one can misguide.Prosecutors "released the note" in May 2014, and said he wrote:
I bear witness that there is no God but Allah and that Muhammad is high messenger (bullet hole) actions came with(bullet hole) a (bullet hole)sege and that is (bullet hole)a Illalah. The US Government is killing our innocent civilians but most of you already know that. (blood streak) a (bullet hole) I can't stand to see much evil go unpunished, (blood streak) Muslims are one body you hurt one (blood streak) you hurt us all, well at least that's how Muhammad (blood streak) wanted it to be forever, the ummad is beginning to rise/awa(bullet hole) has awoken the Mujahideen, know you are fighting men who look into the barrel of your gun and see heaven, now how can you compete with that. We are promised victory and we will surely get it. Now I don't like killing innocent people, it is forgiven in Islam but due to sai(bullet hole) it is allowed. All credit goes (huge, suspicious hole not caused by a bullet, which probably was caused by government "agents" to explain why the sentence they added to the notes is carved into wood panels instead)."
“I’m jealous of my brother who ha[s] [re]ceived the reward of jannutul Firdaus (inshallah) before me. I do not mourn because his soul is very much alive. God has a plan for each person. Mine was to hide in this boat and shed some light on our actions. I ask Allah to make me a shahied (iA) to allow me to return to him and be among all the righteous people in the highest levels of heaven. He who Allah guides no one can misguide. A[llah Ak]bar! The US Government is killing our innocent civilians but most of you already know that. As a [UI] I can’t stand to see such evil go unpunished, we Muslims are one body, you hurt one you hurt us all. Well at least that’s how muhhammad (pbuh) wanted it to be [for]ever, the ummah is beginning to rise/[UI] has awoken the mujahideen, know you are fighting men who look into the barrel of your gun and see heaven, now how can you compete with that. We are promised victory and we will surely get it. Now I don’t like killing innocent people it is forbidden in Islam but due to said [UI] it is allowed. All credit goes [UI]. Stop killing our innocent people and we will stop.”[Jannat ul Firdaus is an Islamic term referring to the highest level in paradise and shahied means "witness" and is also used to denote "martyr."]
Below is the government's transcription of, and commentary on, Tsarnaev's note in the boat from a court document dated May 21, 2014.
Below is the government's transcription presented at Tsarnaev's trial in 2015, after his attorney told the jury in opening statements that "he did it."
Take notice that in the government's 2014 transcription of Tsarnaev's note, which was written in lowercase in pencil on the boat panels, the sentence, "I bear witness that there is no God but Allah and that Muhammad is high messenger (bullet hole) actions came with(bullet hole) a (bullet hole)sege and that is (bullet hole)a Illalah," was eliminated, and in its place was added: "A[llah Ak]bar!"
Also take notice of the government's claim that Tsarnaev wrote, in mostly capital letters, carved into boards which were attached to the boat, "Stop killing our innocent people and we will stop" (image below).
The wood carving is highly suspicious and doesn't match the handwriting in pencil. At Tsarnaev's trial in March 2015, Michael Nealon, a special agent with the FBI, testified that the carving into the boards was discovered after a fire extinguisher was discharged, which highlighted the carvings. The boards were brought to court, and prosecutors showed them to jurors for maximum impact.
Jurors where brought to the boat at an undisclosed location. The boat was on a trailer, tires flat, on top of a flatbed truck. First, jurors walked outside the the boat, and then jurors were elevated to see the boat from higher up. They were lifted, two by two, on forklift, with an FBI agent escort, to look into the boat. Jurors viewed the boat for a half hour, but nobody could walk inside the boat. All viewing was done while outside the boat, so it would have been difficult to read Dzhokhar's note. The writing was faint: the first half of the note was on the rail and the second half was below the rail. The note was written on the side that contained the most bullet holes. Bullet damage was of great interest to jurors, perhaps because the gunfire was not part of the testimony at trial. Press reporters said they counted 110 bullet holes, but it was not clear if they were entry or exit holes: 15 starboard, 15 on stern, 68 on port side, 10 on the railing. The two vertical streaks of dried blood were visible. As noted above, the two panels with the suspicious carving had been removed from the boat and brought to the courtroom and shown to the jury for maximum impact.
Since his arrest, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has been blocked from giving media interviews, so he was incapable of disputing the inaccuracy of the government's 2014 transcription of the notes in the boat. He did not testify during his trial, probably in fear that his family in the U.S. would be, in the least, incarcerated on bogus charges, and, at the worst, killed by government employees (thugs with badges and guns).
In the trial by press — where shadowy government sources, speaking anonymously, planted strategic leaks into the mass media — it has been widely reported that Dzhokhar, in the notes written in the boat, "denounced the U.S. for its wars in Muslim countries" and wrote that he couldn't stand to see the U.S. government "go unpunished" for killing Muslims. In the Tsarnaev case, the government fed inaccurate prejudicial information (usually anonymously) to the press, implying Tamerlan and Dzhokhar’s guilt, despite having flimsy or no evidence. In the most extreme example, prosecutors had to completely recant their accusation that the brothers robbed a 7-Eleven.
The truth is simple to understand unlike the convoluted mess of lies spread by the government. It is a crime to make false statements to law enforcement personnel but it is legal for them to lie to you. Apparently is it not a crime for the prosecution to lie about the facts of a case to the press and during the trial, and for its witnesses to lie on the stand under oath. This is why you should never answer questions by government employees such as the police and FBI — you have the right to remain silent and you have the right to legitimate expectation of privacy (of your person, clothing, purse, luggage, vehicle, house, apartment, hotel room, and place of business, to name a few examples). The police will misconstrue what you say and fabricate, alter, hide, plant and destroy evidence to help the prosecution convict you, and judges will be biased against you and lenient with the prosecution, who work for the same system they do.
"It is far harder to promulgate a lie than to simply tell the truth."The U.S. Government has become like the brutal governments of other countries. For example, former Washington Post reporter David Satter argued convincingly in his 2003 book on Russia, Darkness at Dawn, that the Russian government had directed deadly and incomprehensible bombings of Russian apartment buildings in 1999, which killed 300 people — to justify a new invasion of Chechnya and to speed Putin’s rise. In the Boston Marathon bombing case, the U.S. government fabricated, altered and withheld evidence, so don't put it past them to plant evidence and entrap associates of the Tsarnaev brothers and threaten them with imprisonment to get them to give false testimony to frame the Tsarnaevs' for the bombings.
The notes written in pencil were written on panels on the left side of the boat. The prosecution claims that Tsarnaev carved another sentence into the boards to the right of the panels. The panels were obstructed by a boat seat and would have been difficult to reach (see the photos below of evidence presented at Tsarnaev's trial). There was plenty of room left on the panels to write another sentence, and there was plenty of lead on the pencil tip (plus there was another pencil still in the toolbox), so why would Tsarnaev carve a sentence on the wood panels (is is unclear if the prosecution presented evidence of the tool he allegedly used to carve the sentence).
On March 10, 2015, Boston police officer Todd Brown, a bomb technician with the Explosive Ordnance Unit, was called to the stand by prosecutors. He explained his background and how he works with the explosives unit that responds to suspicious packages, among other things. He testified that he was part of the explosives team during the 2013 Boston Marathon and that he responded to the scene after the bombs went off "to clear packages, make sure there were no other devices." His job was to make sure there were no more explosive devices on Boylston Street, including sometimes using a "controlled explosion" when seeing something suspicious.
Brown testified that on April 19, 2013 that he went to the Boston neighborhood of Watertown and that there were about six bomb technicians on the scene. He said: "There was a suspect in a boat. We were going to have to clear the boat." He testified that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was arrested and placed on a stretcher. Brown said he then entered the boat to "sweep" it "for any booby traps." He found no dangerous items but noticed "something written inside the boat." Brown testified: "It was written with a pencil" inside the hull of the boat. He said he noticed bullet holes in the boat, from the police shooting and that there was blood in the boat.
The prosecution presented the photos to the jury and read to the jury the government's transcription of Tsarnaev's notes.
The Guardian reported that jurors in the trial of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev visited the blood-stained and gunshot-riddled boat in which he was captured on April 19, 2013, and walked around the boat, taking notes, and then went two at a time onto an elevator so they could look inside the vessel, which was on a trailer:
Jurors in the trial of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev visited the blood-stained and gunshot riddled boat in which he was captured on April 19, 2013, hiding under its tarpaulin. The jurors walked around the outside of the boat and peered inside. Tsarnaev, flanked by three attorneys and U.S. marshals, watched from a table about 50 feet away. The red and white boat is covered with more than 100 bullet holes, marked individually with small pieces of white evidence tape. One of the boat’s two front windows is shot out almost completely, with just one shattered piece of glass remaining. Jurors walked around the boat, taking notes, and then went two at a time on to an elevator so they could look inside the vessel, which was on a trailer. Inside the boat, which is called the Slipaway II, they could see the note Tsarnaev wrote. The note, written in pencil, is speckled with bullet holes and stained with long streaks of blood. The boat is considered evidence and is impounded by the government. The trial judge ruled that its location could not be revealed to ensure the security of jurors and the defendant.ABC News reported on May 16, 2013 that police in Massachusetts told them Tsarnaev wrote "F*** America" on the side panel of the boat, and that officers said they also discovered the phrase "Praise Allah" on the boat's side panels and several anti-American screeds, including references to Iraq, Afghanistan and "the infidels." Based on photos of the panels presented at trial, Tsarnaev didn't write F*** America or praise Allah nor did he make any reference to Iraq, Afghanistan or infidels; however, he did write about Allah.
Also according to ABC News on May 16, 2013: "Spokespeople for the Massachusetts State Police and the Watertown police had denied the existence of the writings when first asked about them by ABC News two weeks ago." The following is the rest of that report by ABC News.
A Massachusetts official showed ABC News what he said was a cell phone picture of the phrase "Praise Allah," written in black ink, with a bullet hole above it, believed to have been written by Dzhokhar as he hid inside the boat. Also seen in the picture was the faintly written word "brother," which the official said was part of a reference by the younger Tsarnaev "that was something about his brother is lucky to be with Allah first."
Today, both departments referred reporters to the FBI. A federal law enforcement official confirmed reports first broadcast by CBS News that writings had been discovered inside the boat.
The discovery of writings intensified tensions between the FBI and local police when FBI agents believed some Boston officers and state police had taken cell phone pictures of the writing.
FBI agents demanded the phones of all officers at the scene the night of the capture of Dzhokhar be confiscated to avoid the photos becoming public before being used as evidence at trial, according to two law enforcement officials.
A FBI spokesperson said agents cannot confiscate phones without a warrant and officials said none of the police approached would agree to turn over their phones to the FBI.
The prosecution presented as evidence the phone calls between the two brothers immediately before and after the bombs exploded. The phone calls placed after the bombings are not suspicious because if you had been attending the event with someone and were separated at the time of the explosions, you instinctively would call to check and see if the other was unharmed.
Compare the phone records presented at trial (the image above) to what CNN reported on April 8, 2105: The times listed by CNN are incorrect. CNN incorrectly reported:
At 2:48 p.m. Dzhokhar calls Tamerlan on the prepaid cell phone (this was suggested in releases to the press but not confirmed) and speaks with him briefly; and then seconds after hanging up, at 2:49 p.m., Tamerlan detonates the first bomb in front of Marathon Sports. About 12 seconds later, at 2:49 p.m., Dzhokhar sets off the second bomb in front of the Forum restaurant.On March 10, 2015, with the inflammatory headline, "Tsarnaev's 'manifesto': OK to kill civilians," CNN reported the following:
The bombs went off at 2:49 and 2:50 p.m., about the same time as he [Dzhokhar Tsarnaev] exchanged phone calls with his brother. FBI agents were already in pursuit, collecting store security videos and looking for somebody suspicious in the marathon crowd. By Wednesday night, authorities had a good idea who they were looking for. By Thursday night, his photo had been released to the public. By the next morning, his brother was dead, and Tsarnaev was hiding in the boat, writing of martyrdom and paradise.According to testimony at Tsarnaev's trial, he first called Tamerlan's cell phone "50 seconds before the bombing" (it was a 19-second call). Looking at Tsarnaev's phone records (image above of the government's exhibit), you can see that the call was made at 02:49:06 PM, so that would mean the first bomb exploded at 02:49:56 PM (four seconds shy of 2:50 PM). The second bomb exploded 12 seconds later, at 02:50:08 PM.
From the government's exhibit of Dzhokhar's phone records, you can see that there were no phone calls on April 15, 2013 before 2:49 PM. The brothers didn't arrive at the marathon until 2:37 PM, stopping first in front of the Back Bay Social Club, then continuing down the street toward the Forum restaurant, which Tamerlan, who reached it first, passed and continued down the street toward the finish line; when Dzhokhar arrived at Forum, he stopped and watched the race from the sidewalk (see the explanation and photos below).
According to a reporter covering the trial, the Forum's surveillance video shows Dzhokhar appearing to put down his backpack at 2:45 PM, four minutes before the first bomb down the street was detonated (which is irrelevant since his white backpack was not used in the bombings, a fact ignored by the press, attorneys and witnesses). So, according to the government's exhibit of Dzhokhar's phone records, he stood at the Forum for four minutes before calling his brother. The surveillance footage from the Forum restaurant (see the government's video exhibit below) contradicts the government's exhibit of Dzhokhar's phone records: he is on and off his phone throughout the four minutes he stood in front of the restaurant.
Video Of Tsarnaev Brothers Around Boylston Street On Day Of Boston Marathon Bombing
According to the government's exhibit, the three phone calls between the two brothers on April 15, 2013 were at:
- 02:49:06 p.m. (outgoing to Tamerlan) - the first bomb near where Tamerlan had been standing exploded 50 seconds later
- 02:51:19 p.m. (incoming from Tamerlan) - this is one minute and 11 seconds after the second bomb exploded near where Dzhokhar had been standing
- 02:53:30 p.m. (outgoing to Tamerlan)
MUST SEE: FBI Blurred Secret Agent In Boston Marathon Bombing Footage!
FBI Secret Agent's Face, Not Blurred
FBI Secret Agent's Earpiece
1. At 02:37:40 p.m., about ten minutes before the first bomb exploded, the brothers turned the corner from Gloucester Street onto Boylston Street, passing a man, probably an FBI agent, standing in the doorway of Whiskey's Steakhouse at 885 Boylson (see map above), seemingly trying to stay out of view of surveillance cameras. These are the first images of the brothers at the marathon.
2. After the two brothers passed him, the agent put what appears to be an earpiece in his ear (see the video above: "MUST SEE: FBI Blurred Secret Agent in Boston Marathon Bombing Footage!"). The FBI blurred the face of the agent in videos released to the public. However, there was an image online where the agent's face wasn't blurred (see the image above labeled, "FBI Secret Agent's Face, Not Blurred"). The official images provided by the FBI showed the patsies allegedly carrying the bombs, while probably being supervised directly by the undercover feds (judging by the blurred faces).
3. Immediately after they passed the agent, the brothers stopped next door, in front of the Back Bay Social Club at 867 Boylston Street (see map and images above). They were photographed standing there together at 02:41 p.m., as if waiting for instructions at a predetermined time before moving to their next locations, and as if someone was positioned to take photographs/video of them for evidence (this does not appear to be CCTV video or surveillance from the high-resolution cameras on the street corners but rather snapshots from a handheld camera). This is the last image of them together at the marathon.
4. The brothers continued down Boylston Street to the Forum restaurant, which Tamerlan reached first, but didn't stop and instead continued down the street toward the finish line; when Dzhokhar got to the Forum, he stopped and watched the marathon.
5. Each brother was caught on surveillance before the blasts, standing without the other, in the location of a bomb site (see map above): Tamerlan was in front of Lencrafters near the finish line, the first bomb site (first photo below), and Dzhokhar was 550 feet away in front of the Forum restaurant, the second bomb site (see photos below under Woody Box's analysis).
6. According to the government's exhibit, the first call between them was made at 02:49:06 p.m., 50 seconds before the first explosion. An image of Dzhokhar (see below) shows him with his phone to his ear while those around him watch the marathon.
7. According to the government's exhibit, the second call between them was made at 02:51:19 p.m., one minute and 11 seconds after the second bomb exploded near where Dzhokhar had been standing
8. According to the government's exhibit, the third call between them was made at 02:53:30 p.m.
9. The brothers did not leave town after the marathon. They went on with life as normal. Three days afther the bombings, the FBI released surveillance video of them with a plea for help in identifying them — even though they already knew them by name and where they lived, etc. It is also interesting that the FBI told the public in a press conference not to consider any other images: “These images should be the only ones, and I emphasize the only ones, that the public should view to assist us.”
RT.com reported that because of Russia's security services, the Tsarnaevs' mother claimed the FBI had been monitoring her sons ever since 2011 and led them along "every step of the way." In an article titled, "They were set up, FBI followed them for years" — Tsarnaevs' mother," it stated of their mother:
Her biggest suspicion surrounding the case was the constant FBI surveillance she said her family was subjected to over the years. She is surprised that having been so stringent with the entire family, the FBI had no idea the sons were supposedly planning a terrorist act.The WSJ reported:
The profile of the Boston bombing in many ways resembles a number of the recent foiled plots, a federal law-enforcement official said. They have been small with little or no intelligence chatter, and have involved suspects who have been in the U.S. for several years and appeared to have assimilated.On April 19, 2013, Land Destroyer covered the story. The following is an excerpt:
What the WSJ categorically fails to mention is that these "foiled plots" were from start to finish engineered by the FBI itself, with suspects under "constant FBI surveillance," just as Tsarnaevs' mother had claimed of her sons.
And, in fact, they are led along every step of the way in the lead-up to high-profile arrests. What is also subsequently left out by the WSJ is that during these undercover operations, real vehicles, weapons, and explosives are involved, and usually switched out for inert items right before the final attack and arrests are made.
A look at the FBI's "foiled plots" will reveal shocking implications about just how deeply the FBI may have been involved with these suspects before the bombing, shootout, and manhunt.
The frightening trend of the FBI cultivating otherwise incapable "terror" suspects — providing them with real explosives, small arms and grenades before giving them inert or controlled devices to carry out attacks on public targets where mass casualties are averted only at the last possible moment — sets the stage for, at the very least, incredible potential for catastrophic blunders and, at worst, false flag attacks.
But does this mean the FBI is capable of turning such operations "live," resulting in real terror attacks and loss of life? Has the FBI ever presided over "sting operations" that were actually carried out? The answer is yes.
The image below from the marathon shows that the first bomb exploded around 4:09:93 after the official start time (a video shows that it exploded at 4:09:52 after the race began).
After the bombings, the FBI stated that both of the marathon pressure-cooker bombs (two 6-quart, Fagor Elites, sold at Macy's) were in black vinyl backpacks.
Dzhokhar's backpack was white (there is no evidence of it in the government's exhibits), and Tamerlan's was dark gray with light gray trim (there is no actual evidence of it in the government's exhibits). Neither backpack is black and neither has light gray/white striping on the straps, as shown in a photo of one of the exploded bombs (see images below). The FBI says the black vinyl bag that contained the first bomb was a Ful backpack and the black vinyl bag containing the second bomb was a Fox backpack.
Remarkably, the FBI, the attorneys for both sides, prosecution witnesses, and the press continue to present Dzhokhar's white backpack as the one containing the second bomb that exploded at the marathon. This is all you need to prove that the Tsarnaevs were setup.
The FBI released to the press in April 2013 the photo below. Conveniently, Dzhokhar's backpack is not visible so you can't see that it is white, but in other images above and below, you can clearly see that it is white.
At Tsarnaev's trial, federal prosecutors showed jurors tattered pieces of a backpack that they claim Dzhokhar used to carry one of the bombs detonated at the marathon. FBI Agent Sarah De Lair held up pieces of the black and white backpack for the jury. She said they were found near the Forum restaurant, where Tsarnaev planted and detonated a bomb. This is a lie: shortly after the bombings, the FBI released the photo below of the exploded Fox backpack at the second bomb site. Apparently, that photo was not entered as evidence at the trial and has been completely disregarded by both sides of the case because it proves that Dzhokhar's backpack could not have contained one of the detonated bombs.
The images of a Fox backpack below are similar to the one photographed in front of the second bomb site, except the backpack containing the bomb had light gray straps.
The photos below show a black Fox backpack which contained the bomb detonated at the second bomb site. This is the location where Dzhokhar had been standing behind the tree shortly before the explosion, as captured by the restaurant's surveillance camera.
Below is a photo of the Forum's railing, which sections off the patio from the sidewalk. The black backpack had been placed at the corner of the patio railing (see Who are the Real Boston Marathon Bombers? Part 2). Most importantly, and clearly not mentioned during Tsarnaev's trial, is the fact that all photo and video evidence of Dzhokhar at the Boston Marathon shows him carrying a white backpack.
Another backpack of Dzhokhar's, a light gray plaid Jansport, which is one of the government's exhibit, was in his dorm room after the bombings. According to the FBI, a friend of his took it from his dorm room and threw it in a dumpster (the friend was convicted of obstruction of justice for doing this). Even though this backpack has no relevancy to the actual bombings, the prosecution called FBI agent Kenneth Benton to testify that he found this Jansport backpack in a landfill near New Bedford. He said that in the backpack they found UMass homework papers, a thumb drive and fireworks.
The government refused the defense's request for the prosecution to provide the surveillance video from Lord & Taylor, which showed a dark-skinned male planting a black backpack in front of the Forum restaurant (click here for Forum employees' accounts of the explosion).
The second bomb blew outward from the Forum restaurant patio toward the street and doorway (you can see in photos below that one of the barriers was blown clear across the street). The coroner who performed the autopsy on Martin Richard testified that majority of his injuries were to the left side of his body (see the images below to determine that the blast must have come from the patio of Forum).
Prosecutors presented evidence of backpacks purchased at Target a day before the bombings: one Ful backpack and one Jansport backpack. [A Jansport backpack was found on Laurel Street in Watertown on April 19th, four days after the bombings (see image below after the Target receipts), so it is irrelevant to the marathon bombings.] The FBI said both backpacks containing the bombs were black. An FBI said testified that in front of Marathon Sports they "found pieces of Ful backpack" in which a bomb was hidden (see the government's exhibit of the "remains of backpack").
Below are photos of black backpacks at the the first bomb site near Lenscrafters, but these backpacks were not submitted as evidence in the trial. The larger photo below shows remains of black backpacks similar to remains in the evidence photo above. However, for the most part, the two black backpacks in the images below were still in one piece, yet this is not what the government wants the public and jury to believe. Tamerlan's backpack was not as black in color as the remains in the evidence photo above or the images of the two backpacks below, a fact that both sides of the case have ignored, which proves that the defense was working with the feds to convict Dzhokhar and which proves that the Tsarnaevs were framed.
Tamerlan, who was an out-of-work boxer living in a 800 SF apartment with his wife and toddler daughter, sent his mother $900 the day before the bombings, supporting evidence that he was recruited and paid by his FBI handler to participate in the bomb drills at the marathon, as tweeted by the Boston police.
BOSTON BOMBING - First moments after Boston Marathon TERROR ATTACK [WARNING - GRAPHIC FOOTAGE]
At the first bomb site near the finish line, the bomb blew out the windows at Lenscrafters as well as glass in the entry door of 673 Boylston, between Lenscrafters and Marathon Sports (see photos below). In the video above, which was taken by an individual at the first bomb site, you can see wounded on the other side of the railing that was in front of Marathon Sports, suggesting that the bomb was placed by the railing in front of Marathon Sports but positioned on the side of the railing that bordered the Lenscrafters' building, since many of the victims ended up in that area.
In the image below, you can see a spindle on the railing is missing and the poster covering the entire railing is torn near that section, which was damage most likely caused by the bomb when it was detonated.
Below is a closeup of a black backpack at the first bomb site. It matches the dark black remains of a backpack that the government photographed as evidence in Dzhokhar's trial (see image above: "photo of remains of backpack"). The image was cut from the photo below it after zooming in on it.
In the photo below you can see the exploded backpack laying on the sidewalk beside the red bags; you can also see another black backpack by the feet of one of the first responders, but this one is still intact.
In the photos below are members of a bomb squad, who performed a "controlled explosion" of a backpack found at the first bomb site. This was Tamerlan's backpack. It did not contain a pressure cooker bomb.
Three days after the bombings, on April 18, 2015, the brother of one of the victims, Jeff Bauman, who lost both legs above the knee, said in an interview with The Telegraph that two and a half minutes before the first bomb exploded, a man wearing a cap, sunglasses and a black jacket over a hooded sweatshirt looked at Jeff and dropped a bag at his feet. “He woke up under so much drugs, asked for a paper and pen and wrote, ‘bag, saw the guy, looked right at me,’” Jeff's brother said. The Telegraph wrote: "The FBI was able to narrow its inquiries down to two suspects who were related from tens of thousands of people pictured in the area before the attacks. The information triggered the manhunt that culminated in the car chase and shoot-outs that shut down Boston."
The bag that Jeff saw Tamerlan place on the sidewalk was not the one that contained the bomb that was detonated at the first location. There were victims on the other side of the railing in front of Marathon Sports, opposite where Tamerlan stood beside Jeff (photos below), so the bomb had to have been placed near the railing. The windows of the Lenscrafters' building, and the glass in the door of the adjacent building, were shattered when the first bomb was detonated during the marathon (see the photos below, which include the door after it was repaired). Judging from the location of the victims of the first bomb site, the first bomb was placed near the patio railing in front of Marathon Sports but on the side that bordered Lenscrafters (click here to see more photos).
It is noteworthy that the bombs at both locations where placed beside patio railings.
Prosecutors claim a cash receipt for one Ful backpack and one Jansport backpack was found in Tamerlan's wallet (see image below). The backpacks found on Laurel Street after Tamerlan was killed were presented as evidence at Dzkohkar's trial (see photos below). Tamerlan's backpack contained a box of ammunition; Dzkohkar's contained some fireworks.
On February 6, 2013, Dzkohkar had traveled to New Hampshire where he legally purchased fireworks in Seabrook. Dzkohkar mostly likely purchased the fireworks for end-of-March Spring Break, to which he had been looking forward, based on his tweets on March 12th and 15th (see below). It was not presented at trial that his friends told the Boston Globe that Dzkohkar liked to play with BB guns and liked to light fireworks for fun. However, during the penalty phase of his trial, two young women, who were part of Dzkohkar's regular off-campus gatherings of a close group of friends from Cambridge, testified for him. They testified that the last time they were all together was Spring Break 2013: they were shooting off fireworks from Jahar's backpack along the banks of the Charles River, and Jahar was dancing through the sparks.
Who are the Real Boston Marathon Bombers? Part 2
Photos from the First Bomb Site Near the Finish Line
May 11, 2015
ReplyDeleteOK, legal teams emerge... let's see if Sr. Helen will take the stand. Tsarnaev is brought in, quietly, and takes his seat.
Defense lawyer Miriam Conrad has taken her place at the podium, w/a thick file and a cup of water, as we await jury and judge.
Judge/jury enter. Defense calls Sr. Helen Prejean.
Several jurors turn to the courtroom door, watching her enter. Perhaps some know of her and her reputation? Her name rings a bell?
Prejean tells the jurors she's been a Catholic nun since 1957, currently based in New Orleans.
Prejean used to teach middle- and high-school English, taught religious ed., established a prison ministry.
Prejean: our ministry focuses on families of death row inmates, but we also work with the families of victims.
Prejean: I visited with Dzhokhar in early March for the first time; she smiles at him when asked to ID him in court.
Prejean: I wanted to meet with him, same reason I met with other people who have done terrible crimes, "to accompany him."
Prejean: I wanted to be by his side, let him know that he has a dignity. I help prisoners come to grips -- Objection. She stops.
Prejean: I knew Tsarnaev was Muslim before I met with him; I looked into the Koran and Islam, to see what we had in common.
Prejean: I have met with Tsarnaev five times from March until just a couple of days ago.
Prejean: "I'm not sure he'd ever met a nun before. He was very open and receptive. He was pleasant. Good."
Prejean: I looked at his face and thought oh my God, he's so young, which he is. "I sensed he was very respectful."
Prejean: I told him that as a Catholic, like a Muslim, our goal is to do the will of God.
Prejean: We talked about his crimes.
Prejean: Tsarnaev disagreed with me about religion, but "it was very, always respectful."
Prejean: "He said it emphatically, he said,"No one deserves to suffer like they did," Tsarnaev said of his victims.
Prejean says Tsarnaev seemed sincere to her. His answer was spontaneous; "I had every reason to believe that it was sincere."
Prejean: "It was his voice...It had pain in it actually." He lowered his eyes.
Prejean: I thought Tsarnaev was "genuinely sorry for what he did."
Prejean: When he said what he did, "I knew, I felt it."
Prejean: Can I talk about my experiences with other prisoners? -- No. -- Ok.
Conrad: Do you believe Jahar is unrepentant? -- Objection. Sustained.
Conrad: Do you believe Tsarnaev is untouched -- Objection. Sustained. Nothing further.
Weinreb to cross.
Weinreb: You don't live here? Prejean: No. W: But the defense asked you here? P: Yes.
W: You think capital punishment is never appropriate, no matter the crime? P: Yes. W: Your group is funded by your speaking fees? P: Yes.
W: You're one of the best-known anti-death penalty advocates in the country? P: Yes. Nothing further.
Conrad is back for re-direct.
Prejean: I would not tell the jury Tsarnaev was remorseful if I really didn't believe it.
Prejean: The defense isn't paying a dime for me to be here.
Prejean steps down
Tsarnaev defense team rests its case.
@JimArmstrongWBZ
The jury also heard about Tsarnaev's father, Anzor, and his long battle with mental illness.
ReplyDeleteAnzor heard voices screaming or whispering his name, saw little lizard-like creatures and animal faces, and suffered panic attacks and insomnia, according to medical records read into evidence Wednesday.
A day earlier, psychiatrist Alexander Niss told the jury that Anzor exhibited the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder after being tortured at a prison camp during the Russian-Chechen wars.
"He was a very sick guy," Niss said. "He was hallucinating. He had a lot of paranoia. He was afraid of KGB. He was looking through his window at his home."
The mental illness may have played a role in Anzor's troubles with his wife, Zubeidat Tsarnaeva.
"The relationship between the parents wasn't an exemplary one," Khozhugov told the jury. "They had a lot of arguments, and they had a lot of conflicts. ... I would say the mother, Zubeidat, had more authority than the father did."
Anzor and Tsarnaev's mother later divorced.
Niss: Anzor Tsarnaev suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder following the Chechen/Russian war.
Dr. Niss reviews his medical records with the jury; he saw Anzor Tsarnaev 28 times over 2 years.
Niss: Anzor had a head injury at age 8, seizures lifelong as a result.
Niss: Anzor suffered from "panic disorders, tense emotionally, startle reflex, voices calling his name."
Gets Rx for Zoloft & Klonopin.
Niss: Anzor Tsarnaev also suffered "from having a lot of concussions in his life" as a boxer.
Prosecution objects, suggesting Tsarnaev's dad's meds aren't related to the issue at hand; judge will allow for now, he says.
With time, Dr. Niss says, Anzor Tsarnaev gets a little better, more calm, but not much. Terribly anxious, paranoid.
By late 2003, Anzor Tsarnaev was getting worse ("disheveled, depressed, symptoms increasing"); Dr. Niss changes his meds.
Niss: By mid-2005, Anzor Tsarnaev was going to the Emergency Room almost every night, physical symptoms from PTSD. "He was a sick guy."
Jim Armstrong @JimArmstrongWBZ · May 5
She is reading into record doctor's notes in which Anzor's symptoms - auditory and visual hallucinations - diagnosed psychosis.
Notes on Anzor attacked in 2009 at Arbat Restaurant, has skull fracture. Has surgery. Altered function results.
Anzor worse after surgery, hallucinations, psychosis. By Oct. 2010, Anzor is really sick.
"If I'm not getting better, my wife would divorce me," Anzor tells doc in Feb. 2011. But he's not getting better.
By April, 1912: doc says, "Patient suffering from mental illness. Not able to work." Divorced his wife. Psychotic.
Kevin Cullen @GlobeCullen
April 22, 2015 Testimony
ReplyDeleteNext witness, under questioning by Al Chakravarty, is Eric Walley, who was caught up in the bombing. He is 67, lives in Boston.
Walked toward the finish line. Was outside Marathon Sports. "We were trying to get through. Quite congested. Pushed my wife Anne."
"There was an almighty boom, and just the smell of firework. I don't remember too much to be honest. I fell to the ground…"
"Last thing I remember was scratching off my pants, which were burning." Conrad objects, overruled.
Where did you land? "We were blown backwards. My wife was blown behind me. I lost consciousness."
Photo shows Walley lying on ground, wife about 5 feet in back of him. "She had a severe injury to her right leg and foot."
"Her heel was blown off. Shrapnel wounds." "Her mouth was damaged with shrapnel and required reconstructive surgery."
Photo shows his pants burned off. His right eye was penetrated by ball bearing. Was leaking fluid, forcing his eye out of socket.
"I had a brain injury. Ball bearing…went through the eye orbit…entered the left temporal lobe." Right leg injured, lost heel bone.
Kevin Cullen @GlobeCullen
"They didn't know who we were, we lost our identification." Anne taken to Faulkner, Eric to Brigham and Women's.
Kevin Cullen @GlobeCullen
Their sons recognized them from photos on the Internet. Walley begins to weep. "She thought I was dead and I thought she was dead"
On Thursday, they brought Anne into his room at Brigham. "I just grabbed her arm and wouldn't let go."
"We both realized we were in this, but we were alive and well." Well, you were alive, Chakravarty allows.
Eric was in hospital 44 days, Anne 32 days. Eric has had 20-25 surgeries. Anne between 15 and 20.
"I had a brain injury, an eye injury,
One of the first things they did was release pressure."
"If I had been anywhere else, I don't think I would have kept the eye."
hoto showing Walley's damaged eye. Lost sight in his eye, but physically kept eyeball in. Photo of his brain injury.
"A second ball bearing…ended up being lodged in" brain, Whalley says."Deemed too risky to remove surgically. It's still in there."
The BB causes him problems, thinking. Surgeons debated whether to amputate his leg. "Ear drum, blasted out."
"I thought I don't want my leg to be amputated." Doctors said they'd give it a shot. But salvaging a leg is complicated.
"I wanted to go for salvage at all cost." Photo shown of Whalley's right foot 10 weeks after. "They couldn't close the wound."
14 mos before he could weight bear. 16-17 mos before he could walk again. "It's like a diabetic foot in which you have" no feeling
"We have good days and bad days, the same for my wife." "I'm concerned about potential stroke risk, seizure risk and memory…"
"I'm really concerned about a premature decline in cognitive function." Has balance and vertigo issues.
Ongoing risk to leg that was salvaged? "Still a risk it could be amputated." How long before wife walked? "6 to 7 months."
Shrapnel in your body besides BB in your brain? "Both legs. They gradually work out to the surface. Thinking of having 3 removed."
Kevin Cullen @GlobeCullen
No cross exam.
Kevin Cullen @GlobeCullen
April 22, 2015 Testimony
ReplyDeleteNext witness, under questioning by Nadine Pellegrini, is Adrienne Haslet-Davis, the dancer who lost a leg but got back dancing.
"I remember hearing a very loud bomb go off behind us. I remember grabbing hold of my husband, saying 'The next one's gonna go.' "
"I did not think it was a firework or anything else. I knew right off the bat it was a terrorist attack."
"I wrapped my arms around my husband and said 'the next one's gonna hit, the next one's gonna hit.' "
Photo from Forum camera after first bomb went off down Boylston. Adam has his arms wrapped around her. She covered her mouth.
"I remember him saying, 'No, no, babe, no.' I opened my eyes and I was on the ground. I screamed Adam and couldn't hear myself."
Her husband lifted up her leg. "I felt nothing, then I heard my husband scream, scream, earth shattering, I never heard it before"
"I could see with him, lifting my left leg, my left foot, it was covered with blood. He didn't stop screaming."
"I crawled along the broken glass, shredding my forearms with broken glass. I could feel the broken glass and my foot dragging…"
She crawled into the Forum. "I was grabbed by my vest by someone and dragged to the bottom of the stairs."
After second bomb, what did you see? "I saw a lot of people. A ton of people in shock." Smell? "Lots of smoke."
Someone took off his shoe and his artery was spurting out blood. His face kept getting whiter and whiter and his speech got slow"
She lost her foot. "I lost my left leg below the knee."
Adam has constant ringing in one ear, all the time. Bloated artery in left foot. Ice cream scoops out of both calves.
Where is Adam now? "He has bravely admitted himself into a mental facility at a Veterans Administration hospital."
Kevin Cullen @GlobeCullen
Marc had been standing near the mailbox in front of Forum when the first bomb exploded down the street, near the finish line. He did not testify as to whether he, like many others, had started to run in the other direction, up the street toward Fairfield Street, after the first blast. If so, he could have been directly under the bomb that was placed at the patio's corner railing, which was a few feet to the left of the mailbox if you're facing Forum. He was there with the Norden brothers, JP and Paul, who both also lost legs in the attacks.
ReplyDeleteApril 22, 2015 Testimony
Marc Fucarile, lost his right leg outside Forum. Longest hospitalized victim, 100 days.
Met JP's brother Paul Norden and others at Forum to cheer on their buddy.
Shows photo of Forum right before the bombing. "I see JP. That's Steve, who drove us there that day." Paul comes in a bit later.
"I remember looking at the sky. A lot of yelling, a lot of screaming, people yelling for tourniquets. Table cloths."
A nurse helped. "Oh, shit, he's still on fire. I need to cut his pants off." Marc undid his belt buckle, burned by it.
(The nurse who was helping him was named Kayla Quinn) "You can see the fire, in my crotch right there. This was before nurse came"
Tried to get up. Couldn't. "That's when I realized something bad had happened. Right leg amputated, instantly."
Was burned 90 percent of his body. "My hair was singed, burnt. Forearms. Hands. Pieces of my chest." Skin grafts.
What's a skin graft? "Cheese grater. They slice your skin off then spread it out using almost like a pizza dough roller."
Most of skin on his back removed for graft. Had to sleep on his stomach. Both eardrums blown apart. Pretty much deaf in one ear.
Where'd leg go? "It went on the street, I guess. A firefighter said I handed it to him." At hospital, "above the knee."
Going for third revision. "First two done primarily for infection. I had two bone infections, so they cut the bone shorter."
Left leg? "My left leg severely burnt, blew off calf muscle."
"Re-pinned my foot back together. Filled with debris, shrapnel." All done? "I just spent 3 hours getting probed with needles."
Has nerve damage. Will you keep left leg? "That's what we're trying to do. Same as what Jess Kensky had."
If they can't save left leg, it will be most likely above the knee. Can you use prosthetic limb? "Occasionally."
Shrapnel in your body? "Yes." You gave us some X-ray photos. Govt offers 3 of them. "BBs" in his groin. "That's a nail."
Still in his body. "They did remove some of them…causing infection. Only able to get 2 out of the 3 they were concerned about."
BB's in another X-ray. They only got the ones "that forced themselves out." 3rd X-ray: what's that? "More BBs" in his chest.
BB lodged near heart? "It's in my right atrium. It came up through my artery. The bomb exploded underneath me."
What if it releases and punctures your lung? "I'd have to get to the hospital." What happened to JP Norden. "Below the knee."
Paul Norden lost his leg above the knee. How many surgeries for you? "The high 60s" Where this morning? "At Walter Reed."
No cross exam for Marc Fucarile.
Kevin Cullen @GlobeCullen
April 22, 2015 Testimony
ReplyDeleteNext witness is Heather Abbott, who lost leg outside Forum. She walks to stand on prosthetic leg. Jahar looks at her.
She was working for Raytheon, went to Red Sox game on Patriots Day, a tradition, then walk to Marathon finish line.
She left game early. (Missed the walk off win) Went to Forum with friends. Four made it inside. Three lagging behind, outside.
Doorman was asking for IDs, she was taking ID out when first bomb exploded down the street.
Photo from video outside Forum. How crowded was it? "Extremely crowded." Do you see yourself? "Yes, I do." White scarf, ball cap.
"I looked in the direction of the explosion, I saw smoke and heard people scream. What came to mind was footage on 9/11."
When second bomb went off, "I was catapulted through the doors of the restaurant that were open. I landed... in puddle of chaos."
"I landed on the ground. People were running in herds by me, through the restaurant, away from where the bomb was."
"I felt like my foot was on fire…I looked at it like it had flames coming out of it. I didn't see anything."
"I started to crawl…I was trying not to get trampled. I screamed for help. Two women came over…one of them said the Hail Mary."
"Her husband picked me up and carried me out. I wanted to get in an ambulance. When I looked down I saw blood pouring out of foot"
In back alley, "it felt forever…but it was maybe a matter of minutes." "I saw blood on the coat of my friend Jessica…"
Tourniquet tied around her leg. Trying to figure out how to get her out of there. EMTs brought her back through restaurant.
"I was just very worried about what was going to happen to me…I knew my foot was hurt really bad."
"During that surgery, they were trying to save my left foot." How many attempts to salvage foot? "Three."
Surgeon recommended amputation below the knee, or I could keep the leg and one would be shorter. never able to run again.
She had been a runner. How make decision? "Surgeon sent veterans in to talk to me..about limb salvage."
"I decided to go ahead and have my leg amputated. Hardest decision I ever had to make." Has had 4 surgeries in leg, one on ear.
Kevin Cullen @GlobeCullen
April 22, 2015 Testimony
ReplyDeletePhoto of Heather, the leg she's wearing today. Photo of Celeste, Kevin and Sydney Corcoran. Photo of Adrienne Haslet-Davis.
Photo of Jeff Bauman, using two prosthetic legs. Photo of Jane Richard, on her tiger leg and crutches.
Photo of JP and Paul Norden. Photo of Karen Rand McWatters. Photo of Mery Daniels. Photo of Marc Fucarile.
Photo of Patrick Downes and Jess Kensky and service dog Rescue. Photo of Paul Norden. Photo of Rebekah Gregory.
Photo of Roseann Sdoia. Photo of Steve Woolfenden and son Leo. Steve's leg missing. Photo of Mary Jo, Kevin and Bill White.
Heather named all the people who lost their legs. The photos showed them at various stages of their recoveries. Powerful.
Dr. David King, trauma surgeon at Mass. General, who after running 2013 marathon operated on victims.
"It was traumatic amputations of the lower extremities with burn blast and fragmentation wounding, worse toward lower part of body
"When injury causes extremity to be mangled, that mangled extremity can't be salvaged we use traumatic amputation" to describe it.
"Recurring theme…around town for all other trauma centers…this predictable, identifiable lower extremity blast with amputation."
"Rapid blood loss" was biggest threat to life. "You can sustain some injury and lose a little bit of blood."
"At some point you no longer have enough to sustain your own life and you will die." Average 70 kilogram adult has 5 liters blood.
Limb bleeding, below the groin, are tourniquettable. Where limbs meet torso or armpit, no way to wrap a tourniquet.
Re Martin Richard's autopsy, would injuries killed him instantly? "He did not die instantaneously. Martin died from blood loss."
Re evisceration of Martin's abdominal wall. Cause pain? "Without question. His injury pattern, particularly abdominal injury…"
"He would have had somatic pain, and the visceral pain, much more primal, very disturbing kind of pain from disruption of" organs.
"Those receptors are generally not responsive to cutting. What does hurt is stretch, distention and twisting."
"In Martin's case, there was disruption of his liver and spleen and intestines…creating stretch that would have…caused pain."
Was Martin particularly vulnerable to the effects of a bomb? "Imagine you're only 3 feet tall, exposed to that explosion at" feet.
"This gets to the principle of distance away from an explosion. For Martin to be standing close to that blast puts him at risk"
So severing of his aorta is an example of this? "Yes." The smaller the person the greater the risk for fatal injury.
No cross exam for Dr. King.
Kevin Cullen @GlobeCullen
April 22, 2015 Testimony
ReplyDeleteNext witness is FBI photographer Michelle Gamble. In charge of photos on Boylston Street on street and for coordinating all images.
Photo in front of Forum. Jahar standing next to tree on sidewalk. Grate on sidewalk was taken as evidence. Used photos to size it.
From railing, where Richard kids are standing, how is that in relation to where the grate is? "Misleading," Conrad says. Sidebar.
The government wants to show how close #Tsarnaev put the bomb behind the Richard family. Defense will object to this line of questioning.
Can you stand in the spot where bomb exploded? Conrad objects. Overruled.
"I'd say 3 and a half feet," Gamble estimates the distance between the bomb and Martin Richard.
Did you create an exhibit where sound of video is synchronized? "Yes." Video admitted.
"What the hell was that?" woman outside Forum says after first bomb. "Something blew up…holy shit!" Then second bomb explodes.
Did you zoom in on video? Yes. Martin shown lying on sidewalk after explosion. No cross of Gamble.
Kevin Cullen @GlobeCullen
April 22, 2015 Testimony
ReplyDeleteIn what could be prosecution's last witness, Steve Woolfenden, who lost leg and whose 3-year-old son Leo was injured.
Steve is a cancer biologist at Novartis. Wife Amber. Son Leo, now 5. Went to Marathon to watch Amber finish.
Leo was in a 3-wheel stroller designed for running. Walked across the Common. Intended to meet friends at In Bar on Bolyston.
"The first bomb detonated." What did you do? "I was in shock and disbelief. Then it registered that we needed to get out of there"
"Most logical…take a 180. But we didn't get that chance. The bomb exploded. I remember the sensation of intense heat, pressure.""
"It felt like every part of my body was punched like humanly impossible." Felt like I was standing cause I held stroller.
"My first instinct was to check on Leo. I pulled back the cover and discovered Leo was conscious, he was alive. He was bleeding."
"I just became extremely terrified. I started to palpate his body, touch his body for other visible injuries. Gently palpated…"
"Decided to get out of here and that's when I discovered my leg was severed off" What did you see? "My left boot was next to stump
Protruding from my boot was my tibia…saw what looked like scotch tape but what I now know was my Achilles."
"My fingers were so numb I couldn't undo the buckle" to get Leo out of stroller. "It smelled like burning hair, blood, sulfur."
"It smelled terrible." What was Leo doing. "Leo was crying, screaming uncontrollably. Saying mommy, daddy, mommy, daddy."
Bystander came over, asked him to get Leo out. Guy put tourniquet on his leg. "He took Leo and they were off."
"I was completely terrified because I didn't know if I was ever going to see my son again."
"Blood all over the sidewalk. All around. I just assumed I was bleeding heavily." "Leo continued to scream Mommy, Daddy."
Another bystander came over, "just talking to me, all I was saying, my son Leo, someone took him. I believe he tried to find him."
Bystander came back with Leo. "I was just lying on the cement, terrified. Several people came up to me but I only remember one."
"They said, 'You're going to fucking make it. You're going to fucking make it.' " "I was terrified of losing my son."
"I was terrified of never seeing my wife again. I didn't know if this was going down the whole race course."
Was Leo handed off to BPD officer Tommy Barrett? "Yes." Photo. "That's my son Leo being carried by Officer Tom Barrett."
"I could feel hands on my body, transfer me onto a stretcher, being lifted into the air and placed in an ambulance."
"My body felt numb but the same time I felt pain in my whole body." Loaded into ambulance with who? "Gina DiMartino."
What did Gina say? "It wasn't what she was saying. She was screaming in pain. She was in intense pain."
"I turned my head to her and asked her her name. I asked her to give me her hand." Why? "Because I wanted to hold someone's hand."
Continued...
Continued testimony of Steve Woolfenden
ReplyDeleteWhat happened at BMC? "On the way in (to ICU) a nurse came up to me took my hand and I grasped it and pulled it down to my face."
"I was separated from my son Leo. You have to help me find him." Nurse said she would. Went into triage room. "I recall screams."
"I was screaming as well." Surgery? "Last things I recall is someone tugging on my ring finger. 'We can't get the ring off.' "
"I thought maybe they were talking about someone else…" "While being transferred to surgery, "I heard a voice." Amber.
"I'm looking for my husband Steve. Oh my god there he is.' Amber grabbed him and said, "Leo is at Children's hospital. He's OK."
Steve felt peace at that. When he woke up, his left leg was gone below the knee.
When Steve woke up, Amber was with Leo at Children's. Leo was in hospital until the Thursday after Monday's bomb.
Leo had laceration on side of his head, and skull fracture, ear drum perforated and minor burns. Leo came to Steve's bedside.
How many surgeries did you have? "I had 2, Formal amputation, then revision surgeries on Tuesday. Also injuries to my right leg."
Steve's right eardrum was perforated. "It resolved on its own." Burns? "I had random burn marks on my left leg."
His arm, his throat, his scrotum. Minor burns on his face. In hospital a week after bombing, then sent to Spaulding for 13 days.
When did you get prosthetic leg. "June 6, 2013." (D-Day) Wearing it today. Did you review Forum video? Yes.
Is that you in the video? Yes. Where's Leo? "You can't see Leo…because he's in the stroller directly in front of me."
Video shows Steve trying to navigate crowd with stroller. Jahar walking past him after leaving bomb. Did you see him? "I did not."
Video shows first explosion down the street. Jahar walks past Steve and Leo. Bomb explodes.
Video shows Steve pulling Leo's blanket out of storage area. "I was going to put it on my leg."
Why is there opening on the stroller. "There's a flap in the back where you can reach your child."
Did man in white hat (Jahar) bump you when he walked by? "I don't recall if he did."
Photo shows stroller, abandoned on Boylston Street. That's the same stroller that the man in the white hat walked by? "Correct."
When you were on the ground, did you look around and see who was around you? "I saw a little boy and his mother."
"I saw Martin's face. And I could see a boy that was, he was fatally injured." "I saw his hair had been singed."
"I saw that his eyes were rolled in the back of his head and his mouth was agape." See his body? "I could see."
"I saw an immense amount of blood. I was really, really terrified." "Terrified."
Hear anything. "I heard please and Martin, being uttered by Denise Richard. Many times." What did Martin do? "I didn't see respons
"She was just pleading with her son. "I placed my hand on her back and Denise turned to me and asked me if I was OK."
"I said I was OK. I was fine. Her attention was back to Martin."
Did you see the arms that went up and went down? Objection. Sustained. "The video speaks for itself," judge says.
Where Denise is over the top of Martin, "I'm next to her in the photograph." Was Martin ever moved? "I don't recall."
David Bruck politely rises, looks toward Steve Woolfenden and says, "No questions."
Prosecution is finished at this point. Defense will begin its presentation on Monday.
Prosecution's final salvo was to show Martin Richard's arms flail up in agony. He did not die instantly. Heinous, cruel, depraved.
Kevin Cullen @GlobeCullen
Clarke: An unrepentant, uncaring, untouched jihadi would never meet with a Catholic nun and open up to her, reveal his regret.
ReplyDeleteClarke: There's no way Tsarnaev pulled the wool over Sister Prejean's eyes. And she's never going to come in here and lie to you.
Clarke: And if he was this "hate-filled jihadi" the govt wants you to believe he is, why would he try to convince a nun otherwise?
Clarke: "We are asking you to choose life. Yes, even for the Boston Marathon bomber."
Clarke: The gov't claims Tsarnaev was motivated to bomb the marathon by an eye-for-an-eye mentality. Is that who we also are?
Clarke: Life in prison "reflects justice and mercy" and allows for redemption.
Weinreb: When Tsarnaev needed a gun, he got one from his friend, saying he needed to rob some drug dealers in Providence.
Weinreb: Despite what you just heard, there's no evidence at all that Tamerlan had his brother get that gun.
Weinreb: Ask yourself this: did you hear any evidence that Tamerlan actually forced his brother to do these things?
Miriam Conrad objects to something Weinreb wants to show, saying the jury has never seen it. She wants a sidebar. Judge says no.
Weinreb gets to show the quotes that come from the earlier writings of a defense witness, talking about Chechnya and culture there.
Conrad rises again - an objects again, saying they have no chance to respond to this. "The objection is overruled."
At issue, earlier writings of defense witness Prof. Michael Reynolds, who seemed to contradict his beliefs when he testified here.
Weinreb: Why didn't we hear from Tsarnaev's parents, sisters, uncle? If defense wanted to talk re: Tamerlan's influence, why not call them?
Weinreb: Why did the defendant commit these crimes, you wonder? Look in Tsarnaev's boat note. He tells us right there.
Weinreb: Tsarnaev doesn't mention his brother when he says "I don't like killing innocent people." He was guided by Allah, not his brother.
Weinreb: Tsarnaev chose on his own to decide where to place his bomb for maximum effect. Both brothers later executed Sean Collier.
Weinreb: But these were political crimes - that stopped the Boston Marathon, closed down Logan Airport, and shut a city down.
Weinreb: Life in prison means Tsarnaev will be "safe, well-fed" and have access to medical care. Friends will visit, he will work out.
Weinreb: Maybe he'll leave behind his memories of Richard, Campbell, and Lu, like he left them on the street when he went to buy milk.
Weinreb: Did you hear any testimony from any witness that speaks louder than his own actions?
Weinreb: Tsarnaev doesn't deserve the death penalty because he is inhuman, he is inhumane.
Weinreb ends, and judge calls a sidebar.
Even over the music, you can hear Miriam Conrad arguing loudly about the content of Weinreb's closing. She's angry the judge allowed it.
Sidebar ends, judge says he will complete his earlier instructions that be began this morning.
Judge: remember, all 12 of you must be unanimous to impose the death sentence.
Tsarnaev jury has begun deliberations in the penalty phase of this trial.
@JimArmstrongWBZ
Another gunman was in area when MIT officer Collier was killed
ReplyDeleteBy Ralph Lopez, Digital Journal
Jun 16, 2013
A recording of police radio activity in Cambridge on the night of the killing of MIT police officer Sean Collier reveals that another gunman was in the area minutes before the first call of "officer down."
The FBI has alleged that Boston bombing suspects Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev killed Collier, although there are no reports of any witnesses or surveillance photography. MIT has issued a call for potential witnesses to the shooting to step forward.
The description of the armed suspect who robbed the 7-11 at 750 Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge, is of a 5"11' Hispanic male wearing a black jacket, jeans, and a black cowboy hat. 7-11 corporate spokesperson Margaret Chabris has confirmed that the suspect in the robbery looked nothing like either of the Tsarnaev brothers, the prime suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing.
Referring to the store's surveillance photography, Chabris told USA Today on April 19, the day one brother was killed and the other captured:
"The suspect in the photos for that particular 7-Eleven robbery looks nothing like the suspects [in the Boston bombing]."
The 7-11 store was robbed at gunpoint about 14 minutes before the call is heard reporting "officer down," at approximately 10:20pm according to an NPR timeline of the events. "Officer down" is heard at 10:34pm in the below recording (about 5 minutes into the bottom Youtube timestamp.) It was widely reported previously that the Tsarnaev brothers' rampage began with the robbery of the 7-11, just under a mile away from where Collier was found dead of multiple gunshot wounds, including to the head.
The Hispanic male is mentioned a number of times, including in an exchange asking for suspects in the area where Collier was found.
Charges have not yet to been filed in the death of Collier, against the surviving brother Dzhokhar. There is no mention of Collier in the criminal complaint against Dzhokhar, which has been filed by the FBI in Boston federal court. On April 25th, the Middlesex County DA also issued a call for witnesses to the shooting. WCVB Boston reported:
"Investigators are asking anyone who was in the area or witnessed the shooting that left an MIT police officer dead last week to contact them."
http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/351783
Tsarnaev Friend in Gun Charge Had Past Arrest for Dealing Marijuana
By Justine Hofherr, Boston.com Staff
July 23, 2014
Stephen Silva, a close friend of the surviving Boston Marathon Bombing suspect, had been arrested for drugs before his Monday arrest for heroin trafficking and gun charges, The Boston Globe reports. Silva allegedly provided the gun that was used to kill MIT police officer Sean Collier.
Federal prosecutors filed charges against Silva alleging that he was in “possession of a firearm with an obliterated serial number.” According to The Globe, it matched the model of pistol—a Ruger model 95 9mm—that was allegedly used in Collier’s shooting.
Collier was allegedly shot by Marathon Bombing suspects Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev in April 2013 while they fled authorities.
It is unclear whether the gun charge Silva faces is related to the shooting of Collier, but The Globe reports that “a Cambridge police official acknowledged that federal prosecutors briefed top officers in the department about Silva’s arrest.”
According to The Globe, when Silva was arrested last November for dealing marijuana at the JFK/UMass MBTA station in Dorchester, he told police: “I smoke a lot of weed every day because my best friend was the bomber.”
http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/2014/07/23/tsarnaev-friend-gun-charge-had-past-arrest-for-dealing-marijuana/PvztnK32b4zNu10QppR9AM/story.html
Silva Testimony
ReplyDeleteOn March 17, 2015, Stephen Silva, a high school friend of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, testified.
Silva, authorities say, was the one who gave Tsarnaev the gun that was used to kill Massachusetts Institute of Technology police officer Sean Collier in the days after the bombings.
His testimony was the product of a plea deal with federal prosecutors. Silva pleaded guilty to unrelated drug and gun charges in December, but his five-to-seven year sentence could be reduced if he cooperates with the government in the Tsarnaev trial. He was scheduled to be sentenced Tuesday, but sentencing was postponed so he could testify at Tsarnaev's trial.
Silva's attorney, Jonathan Shapiro, told reporters that his client "was not happy" about testifying against Tsarnaev, but that his client's plea deal was solid. "I'm sure the government believes he cooperated fully," he said.
Silva once described Tsarnaev to prosecutors as "one of the realest and coolest kids he ever met." Silva testified that, on a typical summer day, the two would drive around, smoke marijuana, drink, and jump off cliffs. Silva also discussed a high school class he took with Tsarnaev where they held a discussion on terrorism and American foreign policy.
"[Dzhokhar] raised the point that American foreign policy tends to be a little hostile towards the Middle East, persecuting Muslims, going to war, trying to take over the people's culture and tell them what to do," Silva recalled Tsarnaev saying. "Americans shouldn't be allowed to go wherever they want and tell people what to do."
Silva had testified to prosecutors that, shortly after the bombings, he had posted on Facebook that "it must have been [Tsarnaev's] brother who got him into it." Silva told Ms. Conrad that Dzhokhar told him "his brother was very strict, very opinionated."
Silva acknowledged to Conrad that Tsarnaev never showed animosity towards the US, and that he celebrated Barack Obama being elected in 2012 on Twitter.
Conrad pointed out that Silva had told prosecutors last August he used "peer pressure" to get Tsarnaev to smoke marijuana. But Silva backtracked on that statement. "I said that wrong... He chose to smoke with me," Silva told Conrad.
Silva described visiting the Tsarnaev brothers' apartment in Cambridge, Mass., in 2012 – the only time he ever visited Tsarnaev at home. He said he met Tamerlan and Tamerlan's wife, Katherine Russell, and their child. He said they watched the television show "The Walking Dead" – which Dzhokhar liked – and he saw Tsarnaev's room. The room featured a Black Standard flag – a flag often associated with Al Qaeda and jihad. A photograph taken months before the Marathon bombings appeared to show Tamerlan posing in front of the flag, and the court later released an image from Dzhokhar's Instagram account showing the younger brother posing in front of the flag.
Silva testified that he never went back to the Tsarnaevs' apartment.
As for the Ruger P95 9mm pistol involved in the MIT shooting, Silva said he bought it for protection after his brother was robbed of marijuana in October 2012. He testified that he gave it to Tsarnaev in February 2013, expecting to get it back "in a few weeks." Tsarnaev then dodged questions about the gun for several weeks. "He just kept coming up with excuses," Silva testified.
Tsarnaev and Silva last saw each other in early April 2013, where Tsarnaev bought some marijuana from Silva in the parking lot of a Mobil gas station.
"I told him I loved him, and I got out the car," Silva said in court, describing the meeting.
Silva's lawyer, Shapiro, said that Silva had no clue the gun would be used to kill a cop, and that Silva "feels badly" about Mr. Collier's murder.
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/USA-Update/2015/0317/What-was-Dzhokhar-Tsarnaev-like-as-a-high-schooler-Old-friend-testifies.-video
In November 2013, Stephen Silva, a high school friend of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, was arrested with two packets of marijuana and $555 in cash after consenting to a search by Mass. Transit Police.
ReplyDeleteIn July 2014, the feds arrested Silva for heroin dealing and possession of a firearm with a partially obliterated serial number.
Officials told Silva's attorney that the gun Silva is charged with possessing in February 2013 is linked to the killing of MIT police officer Sean Collier.
The government says the gun was found near the scene of the shootout where Tamerlan was killed and Dzhokhar was injured.
In December 2014, Silva reached a plea deal with the feds in exchange for his testimony against Tsarnaev. His sentencing was postponed until after he testified at Tsarnaev's trial. His deal with the government to testify against Tsarnaev could reduce his five-to-seven sentence. Silva's attorney told reporters that his client "was not happy" about testifying against Tsarnaev, but that his client's plea deal was solid.
As for the Ruger P95 9mm pistol involved in the MIT shooting, Silva testified that he gave it to Tsarnaev in February 2013, expecting to get it back "in a few weeks." Tsarnaev then dodged questions about the gun for several weeks. "He just kept coming up with excuses," Silva testified.
Doumentation and video surveillance presented at Tsarnaev's trial showed he and his brother Tamerlan rented rented a Glock 17 and a Glock 34 at a gun range in New Hampshire on March 20, 2013, and spent about an hour shooting them at the range.
If Dzhokhar was in possession of Silva's Ruger 9mm beginning in February 2013, why would he need to rent a gun on March 20, 2013 to practive at a gun range?
CONTINUED...
At Dzhokhar's trial, a MIT graduate student identified him as the man he saw leaning in to Collier's police cruiser.
ReplyDeleteNathan Harman, 24, a student working toward a Ph.D. in mathematics, testified that he was riding his bike through a campus courtyard at about 10:20 p.m. on April 18, 2013, when he saw a parked MIT police cruiser. Harman said the driver's-side door was open and there was a man bent at the waist and leaning in to the cruiser.
"He sort of snapped up, stood up and turned around, and he looked startled," Harman said. "And then I just didn't think anything of it and rode off."
When asked by a prosecutor if he saw the person in the courtroom, Harman pointed to Tsarnaev. "He's right there," he said.
Harman said he assumed Tsarnaev was an MIT student.
"I remember thinking he had a big nose, but nothing beyond that really," he said.
Harman said he did not see a second person near the cruiser.
Prosecutors say Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev killed Collier as he sat in his cruiser that night in a failed attempt to steal his gun.
Prosecutors showed jurors a surveillance video of Collier's parked cruiser, with two figures walking up behind it, then going to the driver's-side window. The car's brake lights go on and off, then the two figures are seen running away. The video does not show the faces of the two people, and prosecutors have acknowledged that their identities cannot be determined by the video.
It was widely reported that the Tsarnaev brothers' rampage began with the robbery of a 7-11 the same night Collier was killed, but a 7-11 corporate spokesperson, referring to the store's surveillance photography, confirmed that the suspect in the robbery looked nothing like either of the Tsarnaev brothers.
The 7-11 was robbed at gunpoint by a 5"11' Hispanic male wearing a black jacket, jeans, and a black cowboy hat.
About 14 minutes after the 7-11 robbery, at approximately 10:20 p.m., a call is heard reporting "officer down" at MIT.
The 7-11 was just under a mile away from where Collier was found dead of multiple gunshot wounds, including to the head.
The Hispanic male is mentioned a number of times, including in an exchange asking for suspects in the area where Collier was found.
As for the Ruger P95 9mm pistol:
ReplyDeleteSilva, Silva and Tsarnaev: A Confusing Story
By Jeralyn, Section Crime in the News
Jul 24, 2014
The ATF determined the serial number and linked it to Danny Sun in Maine, who bought it from Cabela’s outdoor supply store in Scarborough, ME on Nov. 27, 2011. Sun told police he gave it to Biniam Tsegai in Portland, Maine. Biniam and two other defendants recently pleaded guilty in federal court in Maine to selling crack cocaine in 2011and are awaiting sentencing. They were caught during a wiretap investigation. The wires were up between June through December 2011. A review of the pleadings in the case, including the prosecutor's statement of facts as to all three, show that contrary to law enforcement leaks in the press, Biniam was not the leader of the group, but worked for the leader, whose name is Hamadi Hassan.
The defense lawyers for Hassan and Tsegai, as well as a lesser involved female defendant named Lacey Armstrong, all say there is absolutely no reference in any of the discovery to Tsarnaev, and the Tsarnaev name has not surfaced in the case.
Also, this was no cartel or major gang. These were gram street dealers selling to users. The total amount involved during the entire duration of the conspiracy, which the Government says begin in 2010 and continued for another year after the wiretaps, until December 2012, was "more than 28 grams" (one ounce); 28 grams carries a 5 year mandatory minimum, while 50 grams carries a 10 year mandatory minimum. So if prosecutors had more than 50 grams, particularly against Hassan, they would have charged it. Tsegai and Armstrong aren't even charged with the 28 gram mandatory minimum (although that could be due to Holder's August 2013 charging memo instructing prosecutors not to file mandatory minimums against non-organizers/leaders of small quantities absent significant ties to cartels or gangs or use of firearms -- the charges were revised by the grand jury in a Second Superseding Indictment in December 2013.
So Stephen had the gun in February 2013, more than a year after Danny Sun bought it at a store. Sun says he gave it to Tsegai. Tsegai was arrested and detained in May 2013. The gun could have gone from Tsegai to any number of people before making its way to Stephen Silva. Even if Stephen did sell or give it to the Tsarnaevs, since Tamerlan knew a lot of Jahar's friends, I don't think there's enough information yet to say whether he gave or sold it to Tamerlan or Jahar.
CONTINUED...
So leaks by law enforcement that this is bad for Jahar because it shows he was more than an errand boy are just speculation. And incredibly out of line for law enforcement, who have no business opining to the media on the specifics and strength of any defendant's defense.
ReplyDeleteTsegai is from Erithea, on the East coast of Africa. Stephan Silva's family comes from Cape Verde, islands off the West coast of Africa. They don't seem to have much in common. It's not even clear they knew each other.
Portland police disputed the claim in the LA Times article which originally broke the story of the gun that Portland has a gang problem.
Stephen Silva has a twin brother named Steven Silva. Their family has been in Cambridge a long time. The Silva twins and Jahar went to high school together, and also attended UMass Dartmouth. The twins then transferred to UMass Boston. The three were also lifeguards together at Harvard.
It seems that Steven Silva was much closer than Stephen to Jahar. His friends says so, and so does a supervisor at Harvard’s Blodgett Pool. Steven and Jahar played soccer together. Also, it's Steven's FB page that laments the charges against his good friends Jahar, Dias and Robel. (The Silvas lived in the same apartment building where Robel was arrested and Steven was close to Robel.) It was Steven who was with Jahar on July 4, 2012, when the cops confronted them sitting in Jahar's car outside a loud house party. (Additional leaks now say police think it was Stephen but there were no arrests or fingerprints taken that night, so it seems like rank speculation. Steven was given a citation and paid a fine for having an open container in the car.)
I think it's very unfair for the media to claim he gave Jahar the gun that killed the police officer when it's not known how the gun got from Tsegai in Maine to Stephen in Boston, whether other people owned it in between, who obliterated the serial number, and whether it went directly from Stephen to either Tsarnaev brother, or whether Stephen gave or sold it to someone else who ended up giving it to the Tsarnaevs. There are a lot of possibilities.
http://www.talkleft.com/story/2014/7/24/5939/90274/crimenews/Silva-Silva-and-Tsarnaev-A-Confusing-Story
The carjacking story is very strange.
ReplyDeleteHow did the Tsarnaev brothers allow the man they carjacked on the night of April 18, 2013 to get away?
The following is an April 21, 2013 story in TIME questioning the carjacking:
The release or escape — it’s unclear which is the case — of a person to whom they had identified themselves immediately put the police hot on their trail. For Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, it was a colossal error.
To recap: after the FBI released images of the two on Thursday night, the men sprang into malevolent action. They first shot and killed an MIT campus police officer. Then they carjacked a man — who has not been identified but is described as a Caucasian in his 20s — and rode with him in his black Mercedes SUV. According to federal authorities, the Tsarnaevs used the man’s ATM card to withdraw $800 from bank machines in the area. This would explain keeping him alive initially, rather than shooting him and taking his car: the brothers would have needed his ATM PIN to access the cash.
The mystery involves what happened next: the Tsarnaevs either dumped their hostage at a Cambridge gas station, or allowed him to escape, perhaps in the confusion after Dzhokhar was caught trying to shoplift junk food from the gas station’s convenience store. (That would count as another pretty boneheaded move, by the way.) The man was unharmed, though understandably hysterical, and immediately called 911.
[Update, April 22, 2:55 p.m.: A federal affidavit released today asserts that the carjacking victim “managed to escape,” though it doesn’t explain how. The affadavit also describes how one of the Tsarnaev brothers showed the victim that he had a loaded gun and told him, “Did you hear about the Boston explosion … I did that.”]
Why had they not already killed him? If the allegations against the Tsarnaevs are true, they were obviously quite capable of killing in cold blood. Assuming they had his ATM number, the owner of the Mercedes no longer served any obvious use to them. What’s more, he knew exactly who they were: the Tsarnaevs had reportedly identified themselves as the marathon bombers.
Naturally, the carjacking victim provided police with the make and license-plate number of his vehicle. Even better, the Tsarnaevs now had their very own GPS beacon, as authorities tracked the location of a cell phone the man had left in his car. Within minutes, police had found the men and an ensuing gun battle left Tamerlan dead and Dzhokhar in hiding, soon to be caught. End of rampage.
Fortunately, things ended that way. The Tsarnaev brothers were armed and had multiple explosive devices. (The carjacking victim told police they drove to another car and transferred arms from it into his vehicle; by some reports the brothers were driving in two separate cars when police confronted them in Watertown.) If no one had been expecting the Mercedes driver home that night, they might have driven his SUV for hours before a missing-person report would have had police searching for the vehicle. By one account, the brothers told their presumably terrified passenger that they “wanted to head to New York.” Officials have said they believe the brothers planned more violence. It’s not implausible to imagine the men driving to Manhattan, about four hours away, and killing numerous more people. Or they could have quickly made their way to one of Boston’s crowded nightlife strips and gone down in a blaze of demented glory.
If the Tsarnaevs intentionally released their hostage, it’s possible they exhibited a note of empathy for a person they had met face to face. But if they made a stupid mistake by allowing him to escape, they would hardly be the first domestic terrorists to commit such a major blunder.
The Tsarnaev brothers were competent enough to kill at least four people. But by letting one man escape with his life, they may have committed a blunder that indirectly spared the lives of many others.
http://swampland.time.com/2013/04/21/give-thanks-for-dumb-terrorists/
Girlfriend of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's friend Dias Kadyrbayev to testify
ReplyDeleteThe Associated Press
June 10, 2014
The girlfriend of a friend of Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is expected to testify against another friend during his trial on obstruction of justice charges, according to lawyers for the man.
In a court filing Monday, lawyers for Azamat Tazhayakov said Bayan Kumiskali provided evidence under an immunity agreement with the government.
Kumiskali is the girlfriend of Dias Kadyrbayev, who attended the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth with Tsarnaev and Tazhayakov. The three men were friends.
Tazhayakov and Kadyrbayev, natives of Kazakhstan, are charged with removing items from Tsarnaev's dorm room several days after the April 2013 bombing.
Prosecutors allege that Kadyrbayev and Tazhayakov went to Tsarnaev's dorm room three days after the bombings and removed Tsarnaev's backpack containing fireworks with explosive powder and his laptop computer. The items were removed the same night the FBI released photos of Tsarnaev and his older brother, Tamerlan, as suspects in the bombings.
An indictment alleges that Kadyrbayev put the backpack with the fireworks in a trash bin outside their New Bedford apartment after Tazhayakov agreed. The backpack was later recovered in a local landfill.
The men have pleaded not guilty. They are not accused of participating in the bombings or knowing about the attack beforehand.
Tazyahakov's trial is scheduled to begin June 30, while Kadyrbayev is slated to go on trial in September. A third friend, Robel Phillipos, charged with lying to investigators, faces a separate trial in late September.
Tazhayakov's lawyers have asked the judge at his trial to instruct the jury to use "particular caution" when evaluating Kumiskali's testimony, "given that she was given an agreement from the government not to be prosecuted for her role in the alleged conduct."
"They may have had reason to make up stories or exaggerate what others did because they want to help themselves," attorney Nicholas Wooldridge wrote in the filing, referring to witnesses who testify under immunity agreements.
Wooldridge would not comment when asked if Kumiskali is also expected to testify against Kadyrbayev and Phillipos. Attorney Arkady Bukh, who also represents Tazhayakov, said he expects Tazhayakov to testify at his trial.
"He's looking forward to come to the trial, to tell the truth," Bukh said. "He is saying the whole family had great respect for this country and the city of Boston, and they feel for the people injured during the explosion.
"He just wants to come out and tell the truth of his non-involvement in the situation."
Remember, it is legal for law enforcement to lie to you but it is a crime if you lie to them, so exercise your right to remain silent. Never answer their questions. They will misconstrue what you say to help the prosecution convict you. The prosecution will release falsehoods to the press for a trial by media, and their lies will be retold over and over and will be considered the truth by the time you go to trial.
ReplyDeleteRobel Phillipos charged with lying to investigators:
A friend of Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar The American friend of Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has been released from federal custody while he awaits trial for allegedly lying to federal investigators probing the April 15 bombings.
Robel Phillipos was charged last week and faces up to eight years in prison and up to a $250,000 fine if convicted.
The 19-year-old was a student at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth with Tsarnaev.
Prosecutors initially asked that Phillipos be held while he awaits trial, arguing that he poses a serious flight risk but both the state’s attorneys and his defense team struck an agreement where he could be released under strict conditions.
He will be released to home confinement while being monitored with an electronic bracelet and a $100,000 secured bond.
Magistrate Judge Marianne Bowler agreed to the request during a hearing Monday afternoon.
'We are confident that in the end we will be able to clear his name,' defense attorney Derege Demissie said.
Assistant U.S .Attorney John Capin said documents filed over the weekend by Phillipos' defense, including many affidavits showing support from family and friends, might be viewed as indirectly questioning the government's case against Phillipos.
'The government stands by its allegations,' Capin said.
Defense attorney Susan Church described Phillipos as a well-liked, honor roll student with many friends and supporters. At least 50 relatives, friends and other supporters attended the court hearing.
Ms Church emphasized that Phillipos is not accused of helping Tsarnaev and his brother plan or carry out the bombings.
Phillipos is accused of lying to investigators about visiting Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's college dorm room on April 18, three days after the bombings.
Two other friends were charged with conspiring to obstruct justice by taking a backpack with fireworks and a laptop from Tsarnaev's dorm room. All four had studied at UMass Dartmouth.
Dias Kadyrbayev and Azamat Tazhayakov, students from Kazakhstan, were charged this week with conspiring to obstruct justice by taking a backpack with fireworks and a laptop from Dzhokhar's dorm room, while Phillipos was charged with lying to investigators about the visit to the dorm room. All three are 19 years old and face the possibility of five or more years in federal prison.
The lawyers for the Kazakh students said their clients had nothing to do with the bombing and were shocked by the crime.
In letters filed with the motion, friends and family members urged the court to release Phillipos on bail, describing him as peaceful and non-violent.
Nancy Gertner, a former federal judge in Massachusetts and a professor at Harvard Law School, said she believes authorities will try to use the conspiracy charges against the friends to turn them into cooperating witnesses against Dzhokhar. They will also see if the defendants can help them determine if there's a wider plot and a continuing danger for citizens.
'I think it's to find out ... are there other tentacles here?' Gertner said.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2320464/Robel-Phillipos-Boston-bombers-American-friend-released-bail-confined-house-arrest.html
Tsarnaev friend found guilty of lying in bombing investigation
ReplyDeletehttp://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2014/10/28/jury-robel-phillipos-starts-sixth-day-deliberations/TC7iQSyuM5v8vGhoH830GI/story.html
Robel Phillipos, who was found guilty on two counts, faces a maximum sentence of eight years in prison on each count.
A federal jury convicted Robel Phillipos, a friend of the Boston Marathon bombing suspect, of two counts of lying to federal agents, ending deliberations that lasted some 35 hours over six days.
Phillipos now becomes the third of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's college friends convicted of crimes related to the removal of an incriminating backpack from Tsarnaev's dorm room days after the deadly explosions.
Phillipos, 21, and a former University of Massachusetts Dartmouth student, now faces a maximum of eight years on each count.
At a news conference, US Attorney Carmen Ortiz said the conviction sends an important message about a singular tragedy for the city. "The friend of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was convicted of misleading authorities about what he saw. He lied to agents when he could have helped. He concealed when he could have assisted. It is a crime to lie to law enforcement agents, and that is why Robel Phillipos was charged and why the jury found him guilty today," Ortiz said
In the cases against Phillipos and the two others, prosecutors revealed no evidence suggesting Tsarnaev's friends knew about the bombing. What emerged, however, was insight into the early stages of the FBI probe, and the mentality of Tsarnaev's tight circle of friends, whose rash decisions one night have had lifelong consequences for each of them.
Kadyrbayev and Tazhayakov, both from Kazakhstan, have been convicted of taking the incriminating backpack, which contained emptied fireworks, and disposing of it at their off-campus apartment.
Phillipos was not charged with taking the items, but with lying to agents about being with the pair and observing what they did.
One juror said the panel was persuaded by a statement that Phillipos signed in front of an FBI agent on April 26, 2013, confessing that he had been in Tsarnaev's room and saw his friends take the backpack. At trial, the defense argued that the statement reflected a false confession coerced by a veteran agent.
The juror said the group passionately debated a range of subjects, including their own marijuana use and Phillipos's youthfulness. There was a lot of argument but finally at the end we all reached the same unanimous conclusion, the juror said. To convict, jurors had to review nine false statements that Phillipos allegedly made during two interviews in April 2013. Two of the statements were made on April 20, and seven on April 25.
Prosecutors ultimately persuaded jurors that Phillipos was guilty of more than half of the alleged false statements in the indictment: two on April 20 related to denying being in Tsarnaev's room, and three out of seven on April 25 related to denying that he later knew that a backpack had been taken.
Based on their verdict, however, jurors appeared to believe that Phillipos may have been telling the truth when he said that he did not see the backpack being taken or know that Kadyrbayev and Tazhayakov were getting rid of it.
Phillipos's lawyers say among the issues they will argue on appeal is that the false statements were not material to the FBI probe. A defense lawyer said by April 20 the two Kazakhstan students had already told the FBI that they had thrown the backpack in a dumpster. Agents ultimately recovered the backpack.
The jury also found that the false statements involved a terrorism investigation a finding that affects Phillipos's sentence. Typically, someone guilty of one count of lying faces a maximum of five years, but the upper limit stretches to eight years if the statement relates to a terrorism probe.
Did police ever find and arrest the Hispanic male who robbed at gunpoint the 7-11 near MIT, 14 minutes before MIT police officer was killed one mile away?
ReplyDeleteDid the Hispanic man have the Ruger P95 9mm pistol which killed Collier?
Did police then claim they found the gun on Laurel Street to frame the brothers.
How could an MIT graduate student riding on his bike at 10:20 p.m. positively identify Dzhokhar as leaning into Collier's window. Eyewitness testimony is often unreliable. The student had never met Dzhokhar and it was dark outside, and all he remembered was that Dzhokher had a large nose.
The feds filed charges against Silva after they learned of his connection to Dzhokhar. Silva then reached a plea deal to reduce his sentence if he testified that he gave the Ruger P95 9mm pistol to Dzhokhar in February 2013.
He faces a 40-year sentence but could get much less.
Part of the testimony:
So unless prosecutor files motion, you'll get at least 5 years?
"Yes."
You're hoping to get time served?
"Best deal I can."
You didn't want to get sentenced until after you testified?
"Yes."
Silva's original sentencing date was the day he testified. He admitted on the stand: "I'm hoping to get the best deal I can possibly get" with his cooperation.
Silva faces a minimum mandatory of five years, prosecutors can cite any "substantial assistance" to eliminate that component of charge
Regarding substantial assistance determination, that's solely up to the US Attorney?
"Yes. It's up to the prosecutor," Silva testified
The government has fabricated, altered and withheld evidence in the Boston Marathon bombing case, so don't put it past them to plant evidence and entrap associates of the brothers and threaten them with imprisonment to get them to give false testimony.
Who Is The Naked Man?
ReplyDelete04/24/2013
CNN reported last Thursday night that the police had taken two men into custody following a car chase possibly in connection with the Boston Marathon bombing and the killing of a police officer at MIT. During the report, they showed footage shot by CNN of one of the suspects, handcuffed and naked, being walked by police to a police cruiser.
The top video below shows the CNN footage. This was aired Thursday night before the early Friday morning shootout that killed Tamerlan Tsarnaev. Who is the naked man in custody? Is it Tamerlan Tsarnaev? If not, who is he and why isn’t there an official explanation of the arrest? If it is Tsarnaev, why did authorities let him go then engage him in a gunfight?
The critical question is, “Is the naked man Tamerlan Tsarnaev?” Judge for yourself. Before you play the video, compare its frozen image of the naked man with the three still photos of Tamerlan Tsarnaev below it. (If you want to get back to that frozen image after you play the video, refresh this page.)
The naked man is either Tamerlan Tsarnaev or his doppelganger. The naked man’s body is uncannily similar to Tsarnaev’s New England Golden Gloves Heavyweight Champion body shown in the photos below. If you want to see more and you’re not squeamish, click for the extremely graphic “Tamerlan death photo” and check out the chest hair and trapezius muscles on the corpse. For a photo of a younger bare-chested Tamerlan click here. In addition, Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s mother and aunt positively identify him as “the naked guy in the video.”
The video beneath the still photos is the eyewitness account of Gabe Ramirez, the CNN journalist who snuck behind the police line to shoot the footage of the naked man. He describes the suspect being interviewed by the FBI on the scene. Keep in mind, this happened Thursday night before the early morning shootout in which Tamerlan Tsarnaev was killed. The longer version of the CNN story (start at 18:12) reports that a second suspect was taken into custody with the naked man.
What happened between Thursday night when this video was shot and early Friday morning when Tamerlan Tsarnaev was killed in a gun battle with police? Perhaps another clue lies in the eyewitness account of the shootout that killed Tsarnaev which contradicts the official story. The eyewitness report given early Friday morning claims that Tsarnaev was first run down by a police SUV then was shot by police without firing first. (Countering this immediate description of events, an eyewitness account that supports the official story cropped up five days later, replete with absolutely indecipherable photos and an angle to sell “Boston Strong” paraphernalia.)
I’m not saying I know what happened or that there was anything sinister afoot, I’m just saying that, after having been subjected to the militaristic treatment depicted in the last video below, the people of Watertown deserve a full accounting of events, including who these two suspects were, why they were arrested and where they are now.
http://www.libertypulse.com/article/who-is-the-naked-man/
Video: Dead Boston bomber nude, under arrest and alive?
ReplyDeleteBy Eric Morales
Apr 22, 2013
Boston - A video of a man being arrested in Watertown calls into question the official story of the death of Tamerlan Tsarnaev. Was he really killed in a shoot out with police?
A doctor who treated the 26-year-old accused Boston Marathon bomber says the former amateur boxer had wounds from head to toe, following a carjacking and firefight with police. Dr. David Schoenfeld at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center said it was unclear what killed the alleged terrorist, but Tamerlan Tsarnaev most likely died due to trauma from multiple gunshot wounds and possibly a bomb blast.
A graphic photo of the accused Chechen bomber later leaked online, showing Tsarnaev with purple lividity marks on his face and a gaping wound on his side.
However now a pair of YouTube videos are calling all that into question.
One video purports to show a man who is said to be Tamerlan Tsarnaev, completely nude to rule out the presence of an explosive belt, and being taken into custody.
The second video has CNN's Drew Griffin interviewing a photojournalist, Gabe Ramirez who states that police took a man into custody at Dexter and Nichols Avenues in Watertown, the town where Tamerlan Tsarnaev is said to had his final show down with police. According to Ramirez the man was ordered to strip nude.
According to the Bay area's KRON, at 12:27 AM one suspect in the Boston Marathon bombing was reported in custody, meanwhile CNN's Susan Candiotti's sources stated that Federal officials were still trying to determine if the man arrested was connected at all to the Boston attacks.
However according to Andrew Kitzenberg, an eyewitness who spoke to MSNBC, and actually photographed a bullet hole from the shootout that had entered his home, stated early Friday morning that the gun battle that killed Tamerlan Tsarnaev had occurred on Laurel Street. Which is less than one mile from the scene of the arrest on Dexter and Nichols.
Tamerlan Tsarnaev's brother was arrested Friday night, and is hospitalized at Beth Israel Hospital under heavy police guard.
Update: Dan Dicks of Press for Truth states that he has interviewed Tamerlan Tsarnaev's aunt who says she can positively identify the nude man in the above video as her nephew.
http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/348553
The police had ordered him out of the car he was driving and told him to remove all of his clothing, including his underwear. Tamerlan was uninjured and fully cooperative. The police then cuffed him and put him in the back seat of a police car. All of this was captured on video tape by CNN and reported live:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kcNAsCynBnU&list=UUUNCsKZEtRS7PMRxC6BZSYw&index=3 [Video is now marked private]
Watertown Shooting - Man Taken into Custody and Stripped
(note the time stamp that shows up at 0:42 in this video clip. As the reporter is talking live to the camera, it shows the time as "03:07 Watertown Massachusetts," meaning that it's 3:07 AM Eastern time on April 19, 2013. You will notice in the second CNN video posted further below, that at the 04:26 Eastern time stamp (seen in the lower right of the screen), the CNN reporters completely reverse and back away from the information they were presenting in this first live video clip. The story has now changed. More details are given with the second CNN video clip). [This video is also now private.]
[Editor's Note: Sept. 22, 2014. I checked this article today in response to a email about Tamerlan, and discovered that the original embedded video, seen above, was replaced by hackers who apparently can get into my server, and replace the original Youtube video embedding code with the another, seen below. This is the second time that I've discovered an original Youtube video embedded by me replaced with another one by a hacker. To me, this is clear confirmation that the video is hitting a nerve with the liars and manipulators who are working with the Zionists to destroy this great nation and its people. ...Ken]
The FBI showed up while Tamerlan was still sitting naked in the back of the police cruiser. The FBI took him out of the police car and allowed him to put on a jacket and pants and then photographed him (still bare footed) repeatedly while standing outside of a building with an FBI guy standing next to him and holding his cuffed hands from behind. After the photographs were taken, Tamerlan is led away by the FBI guy, first towards the direction of the video camera recording the scene; then at a later point (seen in a second CNN video posted further below), we see Tamerlan being led by the same FBI guy towards the building entrance that he was photographed in front of.
That is the last time we see Tamerlan Tsarnaev alive.
I captured a number of stills from Youtube videos and compared them to crops and enlargements made of Tamerlan photos found on the internet. I'll post two here, but you will see more further below. I changed the color intensity, brightness, and contrast of the video capture on the left, so the skin tone of the man being put into the police car looks closer to normal skin color (for comparison purposes with the photo on the right). In so doing, I shifted the color of everything in the capture towards the red, which made the blue light bar on the police cruiser seen in the background shift from blue to red. I will also embed 3 videos further below of the aunt of Tamerlan, Maret Tsarnaev, who claims with 100% certainty, that the "naked man" seen on the Youtube videos, is her nephew, Tamerlan Tsarnaev.
http://educate-yourself.org/cn/tszopjidbw02may13.shtml
What Really Happened in Watertown? What if…. [Excerpt]
ReplyDeleteMonica Perez
May 2, 2013
This is the official story…
Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev lured MIT Officer Sean Collier onto campus and shot him five times execution style in his car to take his gun (which ultimately they were unable to remove from his holster) because they only had one hand gun and one pellet gun. This story, however, conflicts with the very clear account by the Watertown Police Chief Ed Deveau that both brothers came out shooting, indicating that they had at least two guns when the firefight in Watertown commenced a short time later. Now, the official story is that only one gun was found at the scene in Watertown, but that new information itself raises a host of questions about the real nature of the “shoot-out,” and of the credibility of Chief Deveau.
After the killing of Officer Collier, the official account continues, Tamerlan Tsarnaev jumped out of an “old sedan,” which was originally reported as a Honda Civic, to hijack a black Mercedes SUV in order to get cash from its driver. The original report of the gas station clerk who gave refuge to the carjacking victim had described him as Caucasian, and as having claimed to be pushed out of his car by hijackers. Later, the carjacking victim was described as Chinese, and claimed he escaped from the two brothers, narrowly dodging one of the brother’s grasping hands.
This Chinese carjacking victim has anonymously told his story which includes the following elements: the two brothers confessed to him of the bombing and the cop-killing; they promised not to kill him because he was Chinese, even though they had just bombed an international event, killing a Chinese woman, and despite the fact that they had just confessed to him and he could identify them; finally, and bizarrely, they asked him if his car could be driven to New York, conveniently tipping off authorities to a second possible plot.
After the carjacking victim escaped, police tracked then chased the brothers in the black SUV to Watertown, where there was a firefight in which the only officer wounded was Boston Transit Police Officer Richard Donohue, who happened to be a friend and former classmate of MIT Officer Sean Collier, and the first responder on the scene of his fellow’s murder in Cambridge.
Officer Donohue may have vital information about the details of Officer Collier’s death, but by coincidence, he was on the front lines in Watertown, the only outsider who fought alongside six local cops who engaged the suspects. Officer Donohue sustained the only injury in the gunfight (aside from the suspects’). Transit Officer Donohue was hit by a single gunshot wound to the femoral artery, suffered a total bleed-out on the scene (he lost 100% of his blood) and had no pulse for 45 minutes, after which, in a true miracle, the hospital replaced his blood and resuscitated him. He is expected to make a good recovery, although he is experiencing short-term memory loss.
http://themonicaperezshow.com/2013/05/02/what-really-happened-in-watertown-what-if/
This is just a brief synopsis of the official narrative as it stands at this moment, but that narrative is ever-evolving, offering to close one gap in the logic just to have another crop up. The story is a moving target with every detail having three or four or five versions reported dutifully by the mainstream media, almost always attributed to an anonymous police source. Assuming that the constantly morphing official version of events gets us no closer to the truth, we are left to our own devices to try to puzzle through some of the logical inconsistencies and possible alternative explanations for them. To this end, I ask,
ReplyDeleteWhat if….
What if the accused Boston Bombers, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, had nothing to do with the killing of the MIT officer? After all, the official story is that, before they were located by police, they lured Officer Collins to a site on the MIT campus and shot him 5 times in his car. This the bombers did, allegedly, to get the officer’s gun because they needed a second handgun. In the end, the Tsarnaevs lost precious getaway time laying in wait for the officer, wasted five bullets in a failed attempt to get a gun they may not have even needed and exposed their position with the high-profile crime.
What if the bombing suspects never shot anyone, including Transit Officer Donohue, who was initially reported as being wounded in a gunbattle with suspects in Cambridge and was in fact taken to a Cambridge hospital where he remains. Only later reports have Officer Donohue placed at the scene in Watertown, which would make him the only cop involved in the initial shoot-out who was not on the Watertown police force. He is the only officer who was injured in Watertown, and although recovering well, he is reported to have short-term memory loss and is unlikely to be able to clear up this discrepancy. (In the case of Officer Donohue, authorities have begun to suggest the possibility of friendly fire, but I don’t even wanna go there!)
What if the Tsarnaevs did not hijack the black SUV? There are pictures of a shot-up and battered SUV, but no evidence connecting that car to the hijacking. In addition, the carjacking victim’s story has been inconsistent, illogical and conflicts with an initial eyewitness report. After all, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s green Honda Civic was at the scene of the shoot-out in Watertown and was searched for bombs from 12:57AM to 5:45AM according to eyewitness reports and photographs.
http://themonicaperezshow.com/2013/05/02/what-really-happened-in-watertown-what-if/
According to some witnesses, both brothers jumped out of the black SUV (then how did the Civic get on the scene?); others claim they both jumped out of the green civic (then there was no carjacking); while the third possibility, that the brothers retrieved the Civic in Cambridge after the carjacking victim escaped and then drove both cars in tandem while being tracked and chased by police through Watertown all the while “hurling explosives at pursuers,” is implausible if not impossible. The presence of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s green Honda Civic at the crime scene casts serious doubt on the hijacking scenario and calls into question all hearsay provided by the alleged carjacking victim.
ReplyDeleteWhat if the man on the ground, who appears in numerous scenes from the Watertown shoot-out, holds the key to the mystery? What if he is an undercover agent–the man police were referring to when they said “it’s a cop” and “it’s not what it looks like?” Perhaps it was he who drove a black SUV to the scene, not hijacked at all. After all, the FBI had once had contact with the brothers, and his parents claim that the FBI were in contact with Tamerlan Tsarnaev even after the bombings.
What if Tamerlan Tsarnaev was not killed in the initial firefight but instead was taken into custody, alive, unharmed, disarmed and subdued? After all, CNN’s Gabe Ramirez (second video below) snuck behind the police line and filmed the Naked Man who bears a very, very strong resemblance to Tamerlan Tsarnaev and who is claimed by Tsarnaev’s aunt and mother to be him, pointing out that the unmistakable body of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, amateur heavyweight boxing champion, is a clear match for the Naked Man, as are his face and gait.
What if Dzhokhar Tsarnaev didn’t run over his brother in the SUV at all, but rather fled on foot after being wounded by police who appear to have fired on the brothers after Tamerlan Tsarnaev said, “We give up,” and “We didn’t do it.” After all, the clips of the citizen video (shown here, below the newscast) fit into the longer version appearing at the end of the newscast and seem to support this possibility.
What if Tamerlan Tsarnaev was really killed in the manner described by this eyewitness immediately after the incident? (Brace yourself before you hit play on this one, and please excuse the music in the background – the original “clean” version has been scrubbed from youtube.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XoXo6X7Xuog
What if there’s more to the events of the night of Thursday, April 18, than we are being told? Does that call into question the entire official account of the Boston Marathon Bombings, including the real roles played by the Tsarnaevs and the FBI before, during and after that event?
I’m not sure, but ask yourself, what if….
If you want more, here’s my video on the subject…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQljL6ZFUGY
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteNew Details in the FBI Shooting Death of Tamerlan Tsarnaev Associate
ReplyDeleteIbragim Todashev’s live-in girlfriend, Tatiana Gruzdeva, reveals what happened in the days leading up to the shooting in their Florida apartment.
By Susan Zalkind | Boston Daily | September 20, 2013
On Wednesday night, hours after the arrest, I spoke with Gruzdeva on the phone. She described to me the events of the days leading up to Todashev’s killing, which she said she learned of while being held in solitary confinement. “There is a lot of pain in my heart,” she told me, weeping.
In the moments before Todashev’s death, the FBI claims, he implicated both himself and marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev in the murder of three young men in Waltham on September 11, 2011. One of those men, Erik Weissman, was my friend. My father Norman Zalkind, a defense lawyer, was representing him for a pending January 2011 drug charge.
The FBI has given conflicting accounts of Todashev’s killing, and institutions including the ACLU and the Boston Globe have called for a fuller investigation of the incident.
A few weeks ago, I sent a Facebook friend request to an account in the name of Todashev’s girlfriend, Tatiana Gruzdeva. Until Wednesday, Gruzdeva had not spoken to the press. Her Facebook profile—which is also linked to her account on the European social network Vk.com—includes dozens of photos and status updates in both English and Russian, and dates back to at least June, 2012. I knew from news reports that Gruzdeva had been held by immigration during the time Todashev was questioned and killed by the FBI. After Todashev’s death, she had been scheduled for deportation, but in August the Globe reported that she had been “mysteriously released” from custody, and that her expired visa had been extended for a year.
On Wednesday night, at 10:41 p.m., my friend request was accepted. We exchanged several messages on Facebook. Soon I found myself on the phone with a woman who told me she was Gruzdeva. She told me it had been only a few hours since the police had arrested her roommate, Ashurmamad Miraliev, and she was shaken. At the time we spoke, no media outlet had reported on Miraliev’s arrest, and his name had never entered the public discussion of the Todashev case. I later independently confirmed Miraliev’s arrest via law enforcement documents and officials; according to Miraliev’s arrest affidavit, he was living at Todashev’s former address. Calls to the FBI, as well as to Gruzdeva’s lawyer, were not immediately returned.
Gruzdeva sent me two photographs—one showing herself with Todashev, another of Todashev alone—as well as a video (posted below) of Todashev apparently taken with a cell phone, in which a woman can be heard speaking to him in Russian. (She also sent me a photo of their cat.)
I identified myself as a reporter, and we talked for a little over an hour, then texted until 1 a.m. At times, she was emotional. She spoke in imperfect English, with a Slavic accent. She said she’d never talked to a member of the press about this. I do not know why she chose to speak to me.
Here is what she told me.
CONTINUED...
When Tatiana Gruzdeva first met Ibgrim Todashev through a mutual friend, she was new to Florida, staying with friends, and looking for a more permanent place to live.
ReplyDeleteTodashev told her he had a big apartment with two floors. He invited her to move in, she said. She took one floor and he took another.
“First it was just friends,” she said, “and after we starting having relationship and we were sleeping together like boyfriend and girlfriend.” She used to cook him meals. Together they adopted a cat, Masia. “It was like a small family, me and him and the cat, he was like a little baby for us.”
She knew Todashev had been married before, to Reni Manukyan, 24, an Armenian-American he had met in Boston. Manukyan has told the Washington Post that she and Todashev were separated. Gruzdeva said she believed they were divorced.
Around the time of the marathon bombing, Gruzdeva recalled, Todashev seemed sad. At first he would not tell her why.
“When the bombings happened, he didn’t tell me it was his friend, he just was so sad. I said, ‘What happen with you?’ He said, ‘Nothing.’ Long time he don’t want to tell me. And after he tell me, “My friend is dead.” He didn’t elaborate, she said. She never knew the name of the friend he was mourning.
One morning in May, as Gruzdeva was washing dishes, Todashev stepped outside. Then, through the window, she heard men shouting: “Move down! Move down!” She turned off the water and looked out to see her boyfriend on the ground, surrounded by FBI agents. They were wearing plainclothes, she said, so at first she had no idea who the men were. “I was so nervous I panicked,” she said. She shut the door and ran upstairs, where she hid in the second floor bathroom. When she emerged, Todashev was in handcuffs, with six or seven FBI agents around him.
They put a chair in the middle of the room, she said, and made Todashev sit in it.
“Ibragim said, ‘I have a pain in my knee, I just had surgery.’ They said, ‘We don’t care, we just have a couple questions for you. We know you was an ultimate fighter with MMA, so we know you could do something.’ He said, ‘I will not do anything because I’m just off surgery, I’m not stupid.’”
The agents began questioning Todashev about the Boston bombing, she said, asking him what he knew and where he was the day of the attack. Gruzdeva spoke up: “He was with me, he was in the house, we didn’t do anything wrong,” she recalled telling the agents.
“They just kept asking again and again, the same questions,” she said.
They asked Todashev if he knew Tamerlan Tsarnaev, she said. He replied that the two of them had been friends. In Boston they had trained in martial arts together and gone clubbing together before Tsarnaev had become more devout. Gruzdeva told me that this was the first time she had heard her boyfriend talk about Tsarnaev.
CONTINUED
Eventually, the agents left with Todashev, confiscating all his phones and all his computers. About six hours later, she said, Todashev came back and reassured her that everything was OK. The next day, she said, agents returned their electronics.
ReplyDeleteIn the days that followed, Gruzdeva said, the FBI contacted the couple regularly on the phone, visited their home, and called them into FBI offices for more questioning.
The agents asked about a call Todashev received from Tsarnaev after Todashev’s surgery. Todashev told the FBI that the two men had simply made small talk. They pressed him, asking why he had deleted the call from his phone’s memory. “I was scared,” Gruzdeva remembered him answering.
When Gruzdeva met with FBI agents, she said, they at first continued to ask her about the marathon bombing. Then they brought up a new topic: a triple murder.
“They said, ‘We think he did something else, before.’ They said he killed three people in Boston 2011 with a knife. I said, ‘It’ s not true! I can’t believe it.’ You know, I was living with him seven months, and we have a cat.”
Gruzdeva told me that she and Todashev believed they were being followed by the FBI on their way to work or to visit friends. Todashev would point out cars that he believed were driven by FBI agents, she said.
One day, the FBI called Todashev back to their office again. Gruzdeva went with him and waited in the lobby, she said. That’s when an agent she recognized approached her and asked to talk.
“And I already saw him a couple times so it was normal, so I told him, ‘I’m waiting for Ibragim,’” she told me. “And he said, ‘So what? It’s just going to be a couple minutes. He knows about it.’” So she went with him to an office. Another agent joined them, she said. Then, she says, they questioned her for three hours.
“They asked me again and again about Ibragim and all this stuff. They asked me, ‘Can you tell us when he will do something?’ I said, ‘No! I can’t!’ Because he wasn’t doing anything, and I didn’t know anything. And they said, ‘Oh, really? So why don’t we call immigration.’”
CONTINUED...
Gruzdev told me that she is from Tiraspol, a town in the former Soviet country of Moldova. She had come to America in 2012 on a student work visa, which had since expired. “I said, ‘Come on guys, you cannot do this! You know my visa was expired and you didn’t do anything. And now because you need me and I say I don’t want to help you, you just call to immigration?’ And they said, ‘Yeah, that’s right.’ And they called immigration and immigration came and they put me in the jail.”
ReplyDeleteA spokeswoman for Immigration and Citizenship Services said that ICE cannot release or confirm any details of an individual detention without a written waiver. Gruzdeva had signed such a waiver, the spokeswoman said, but it had since expired.
For the first week, Gruzdeva told me, she was kept in an immigration detention facility. She was allowed to talk to Todashev every day on the phone. She said he told her that when he had come to find her in the lobby the day she was detained, FBI agents mocked him, saying “Where’s your girlfriend?”
She said the mocking infuriated Todashev. “He said, ‘I want to hit them because I was so mad, why they lie to me? They stole you.’”
Later that week, the facility had a visiting day, she said. Todashev came to see her.
“He kissed me, he hugged me like never, it was so sweet, like always. And he tell me, ‘I will marry you when you get out of here, or in the jail, whatever. If we can marry in the jail, we will marry in the jail.’”
On May 22, Gruzdeva said, she was transferred from immigration jail to a cell in Glades County Jail in Moore Haven, Florida. There, she said, she was placed in solitary confinement.
“I thought I would be released, because I don’t have any crime, I don’t have any charges, I was clear,” she said. She asked why she had been moved. “And they just said, “Oh we cannot tell you, we’ll tell you tomorrow in the morning.”
She did not know it yet, but that was the day Todashev had been fatally shot by the FBI.
The next morning, she said, immigration officers and “other officers” came to her cell.
CONTINUED...
“They said, ‘He’s dead.’
ReplyDelete“I said, ‘That’s not true. I just saw him a couple days ago and I talked with him yesterday. He cannot be dead.’
“They said, ‘He died yesterday.’
“I said, ‘No! I just talked with him.’
“They said, ‘We have a paper, and it says that he’s dead, and you can make a phone call.’”
She called her friend Husain, the one who had introduced them. He told her it was true: Todashev was dead.
“And I’m screaming. I have panic attack. I realize, I realize, he is really dead.” As she told me the story on the phone, she began to weep.
“And everything is flush in my heart, my heart was broken, because me and Ibragim we had a plan, we had a plan to be together, we had a plan to have a family. Yes we were different, we had a different culture, different religion, but it was ok, he tell me, everything will be ok, we’ll all figure it out. But he want to be with me and I want to be with him, we had a plan to have children and everything. And now, he’s not here and we’re not going to be together anymore.”
She said she was so distraught that she was given a sedative.
Gruzdeva was kept in solitary confinement for four more days, she said, before being placed in a women’s dormitory at the same prison.
Finally, on August 8, she was released from custody. She said Ashurmamad Miraliev, a friend of Todashev—the same man arrested on Wednesday—came to pick her up, along with Todashev’s father, Abdulbaki, who had flown to Florida from Chechnya to meet with prosecutors. They drove her back to the house she had shared with Todashev, where he had been killed. “They said, ‘Don’t worry the house is clean and we cleaned everything.’”
Miraliev became Gruzdeva’s roommate, she said, helping her to pay the rent. On Wednesday, the two of them were on their way to visit her immigration officer when they were stopped by the police. “It was police cars, police cars, police cars. Undercover people they just stop us with five police cars.” They arrested Miraliev. “They told me he was in Orange County jail,” she said. “I don’t know why they took him.”
Gruzdeva told me she is waiting for immigration to process a work authorization form she has applied for. “After I have my work authorization and social security I will move to a different state,” she said. “Or maybe different city. Because I cannot be here anymore. It’s too much for me .… It’s really painful every day to wake up now in this house.”
http://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/blog/2013/09/20/new-details-fbi-shooting-death-tamerlan-tsarnaev-associate/
trestradapalma • 2 years ago
ReplyDeleteAll this is rather simple. Obama publicly claimed the right to assassinate American citizens and he is following through with exercising his self anointed privilege. It's like night of the long knives but during the days as well - pretty much everyday. It's perfectly legal for a gang of steroid abusing hyped up cops to corner then gun down a women armed with a baby in broad daylight in the nation's capital.
There are unlimited ways in which government "officials" can legally murder you and get away with it. Even when they get caught red handed like with Fast and Furious or the Benghazi stand down nothing ever happens to the responsible parties.
However, the people see what's going on and I assure everyone they won't sit by passively forever.
Sheep2Slaughter • 2 years ago
Read the "Terror Factory" by Trevor Aaronson if you'd like an inside look at how our infamous FBI manufactures, beyond believe, and quite entertainingly i must add, most of their.........."we are saving America from terrorist" cases. Its enough to make you vomit!
Roninf9 • 2 years ago
There was only one reason for the FBI to assassinate Todashev. He could prove that the Boston Bombing was state sponsored false flag terrorism. The two FBI agents that "fell out of a helicopter" not long after also knew too much.
NadePaulKuciGravMcKi • 2 years ago
They are trying every dirty trick in the book;
Proud Government Racketeering Syndicate
Megalomaniacs, Narcissists, Sociopaths, Psychopaths
John Washburn • 2 years ago
Has the FBI provided any evidence (e.g. video of Todashev, audio of Todashev, a hand written statement by Todashev, etc.) to support their self -serving claim:
"In the moments before Todashev’s death, the FBI claims, he implicated
both himself and marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev in the
murder of three young men in Waltham on September 11, 2011."
John Washburn • 2 years ago
They are certainly stonewalling on my FOIA request for camera footage and accompanying audio of the street and event cameras pointing at the explosion sight of the Boston bombing.
Anonymous • 1 day ago
And why have they not released camera footage from the 50 plus cop cars on the scene in Watertown where Tamerlan was killed? Instead, Andrew Kitzenberg's out of focus, dark and long distance iPhone snapshots are submitted into evidence. And he is called to testify because what he says supports the government's bogus story. He doesn't have video, just blurry snapshots.
Andrew Kitzenberg and Daniel Glenck were involved in falsely laying the blame on Dzhokhar Tsarnaev as the “terrorist.” Both Kitzenberg and Glenck played a key part in framing Dzhokhar and falsely claiming he engaged in a firefight with police officers.
According to the Las Vegas Sun on April 20th, FBI agent David Green clearly is implicated in framing the brothers:
“Seconds after the bombs exploded, David Green from Jacksonville, Florida, pulled out his smart-phone and took a photo of the chaos developing a couple hundred yards in front of him — the smoke, the people running in panic.” How convenient that he pulled out his smartphone just in time to catch Dzhokhar running away from the blast site.
Read more: http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2013/apr/20/runner-spectator-get-photos-marathon-suspects/#ixzz2Rm8bA0ZP
Man who gave gun to Boston bomber Tsarnaev freed after pleading for 'second chance'
ReplyDeleteAn admitted drug dealer, Stephen Silva said Tuesday he wished he could "go back in time" and change what he did.
UPI
Dec. 22, 2015
The man who loaned a handgun to terrorist Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, which was used to kill a police officer following the Boston Marathon bombings nearly three years ago, was ordered released Tuesday after spending a year-and-a-half in prison.
Stephen Silva pleaded guilty to gun and narcotics charges at trial before Tuesday's sentencing. At the hearing, Silva pleaded with U.S. District Judge Mark Wolf for leniency.
"Your Honor, I'm just pleading for a second chance,'' Silva, 22, said. "I wish I could go back in time and change my actions. I was young, dumb, and thought I could outsmart everyone."
Wolf sentenced Silva to time served -- 17 months -- meaning he was to be released from custody immediately.
Prosecutors had recommended a sentence of 18 months.
Silva gave Tsarnaev the handgun that was used to shoot Massachusetts Institute of Technology police officer Sean Collier three days after the marathon bombings nearly three years ago. However, prosecutors and the judge said Silva cooperated with authorities and helped convict Tsarnaev during his federal prosecution.
"Silva cooperated in and testified at one of the most important terrorism cases in Massachusetts history,'' federal prosecutors wrote.
According to investigators, Tsarnaev had told Silva that he needed the gun to rob a drug dealer -- but did not disclose plans hatched by he and his older brother, Tamerlan, to bomb the Boston Marathon on April 15, 2013.
"I had no idea that the firearm I lent to Tsarnaev would be used in the way it was,'' Silva told Wolf.
Silva was a casual acquaintance of Tsarnaev's, prosecutors said, and once earned about $3,000 per month selling marijuana and heroin. At one time, he sold narcotics to undercover federal agents.
Three people, including an 8-year-old boy, died in the explosions near the finish line at the marathon. Two police officers, including MIT's Collier, later died during the manhunt for the bombers. Tamerlan Tsarnaev was killed during a shootout with police in nearby Watertown when, officials said, he was run over by a fleeing SUV driven by his younger brother.
Nearly two years after the attack, on April 8, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was convicted on 30 criminal counts. On June 24, he was sentenced to die by lethal injection and subsequently transported to a maximum-security prison in Colorado.
http://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2015/12/22/Man-who-gave-gun-to-Boston-bomber-Tsarnaev-freed-after-pleading-for-second-chance/9561450811572/?st_rec=1281452905581
Heather Frizzell said:
ReplyDeleteI also have a lot of problems with Steven Silva’s testimony in general (I didn’t find him very trustworthy), and admittedly the whole business with obtaining the gun is still one of the biggest question marks about this case to me. I hope to look into it further and write more about it in a future post. But I think it’s clear that whatever reason Dzhokhar may have claimed for needing it, he didn’t use it in any other criminal activity – no evidence was given of such, and honestly it strikes me as extremely inconsistent with all other established aspects of his character and temperament.
Additionally, I have long suspected the reports of his “wild” side to be exaggerated, by both the media and the prosecution. I’ve mentioned this before, but I need to stress that marijuana is looked upon VERY laxly around here. Possession of up to an ounce is decriminalized and only results in a $100 fine. Selling is a bit worse, but considering medical marijuana became legal in 2012, everyone I know is just waiting for it to be legalized completely – I think it’s planned for the 2016 ballot. If there was evidence he was dealing harder drugs I might suspect a deeper criminal involvement, but as is it always seemed to me he was just dealing on campus for some extra pocket money… it can’t have been a hugely lucrative operation if he was supplementing it with summer lifeguarding. This seems to be backed up by the fact that he only had $952 in his bank account upon arrest, which seems about right for a broke college student, not a drug kingpin. Unless he had wads of cash stuffed in his mattress or something, but I suspect we would have heard about that. (On cross exam, the defense witness basically just kind of rolled her eyes and sounded annoyed when the prosecution tried to ask her about it, indicating to me his peers didn’t think it was a big deal either.)
As a college prof who teaches incoming freshmen I nearly had a heart attack when I saw his transcripts; he was signed up for SIX classes his first semester, including two chemistry classes and an engineering class! I want to know what advisor in their right mind let him do that. Even Einstein himself couldn’t handle a workload like that as a freshman. No wonder he was doing so poorly there – it looks like he got off to a bad start, lost his confidence and never recovered. (Although considering he knew he was on academic probation and it seemed he was focused on transferring, I’ve been really curious about whether his grades actually improved that last semester or not. Since he was in custody before it was over, no grades were filed. I think it would actually go a long way to indicate state of mind if we could know whether he buckled down and had specific, non-terrorism-oriented goals – which might account for behavior such as quitting drinking and smoking pot that were mentioned, which instead were used as more “indicators” of “radicalization.”)
https://heatherfrizzell.wordpress.com/2015/08/24/junk-psychology-and-courtroom-islamophobia-a-breakdown-of-motive-as-presented-in-the-tsarnaev-trial/#more-438
On the evening of April 18, 2013, the FBI released photographs of the Tsarnaev brothers to the public for the first time. According to the bureau, agents had been sitting on the images for about 36 hours. Even though the Boston FBI office had previously interviewed and monitored Tamerlan Tsarnaev—a two-time New England Golden Gloves boxing champion relatively well known in the area—agents apparently couldn’t remember his name. The bureau's face recognition software failed. So, the narrative goes, having run out of options, the FBI called on the public to help.
ReplyDelete(36 hours and FBI face recognition could not ID them?, even through drivers licenses etc?)
About five hours after the photographs were released, MIT police officer Sean Collier was shot multiple times at the intersection of Vassar and Main streets in Cambridge. He died that night.
After the FBI released the photographs of their suspects, people who knew the Tsarnaevs called the FBI’s tip line to identify the brothers.
(people Id'd them)
And yet, according to the FBI’s narrative, the bureau and the local police did not know the brothers’ names until after Collier’s murder, an alleged carjacking, and a gun battle with police in a quiet, residential neighborhood of the Boston suburb Watertown. More than seven hours passed between the time the FBI released the photographs to the public and the time Tamerlan’s corpse was fingerprinted in the hospital at approximately one am on Friday morning. The FBI claims it only then discovered Tamerlan’s identity.
https://privacysos.org/node/1385
"It is not probable the FBI agents who dealt with Tamerlan Tsarnaev could not remember what he looked like other than they did a slipshod investigation. You’d think that at a minimum the FBI would have had a file on all the people in Boston who had been identified as possible terror suspects with their pictures in it and someone would have looked at that folder prior to releasing the pictures publicly." Yep--a file or a database of photos seems highly logical--"let's flip through the usual cache of suspects, Fred"--every available agent in the country was working this case. And per Boston LE press releases, they had three days to figure out who these people were, time to look at the Forum vid literally thousands of time, and time to contact Tamerlan on Wed when he told them "you know where to find me," per his Mama before she was shut down if she wanted to keep speaking with DT (presumably why she clammed up.)
FBI Official: Tsarnaev Surveillance Allegations Are ‘Patently False’
ReplyDeleteThe bureau maintains it didn’t know the identities of the bombing suspects until after
Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s corpse was fingerprinted, contrary to what an MIT patrol supervisor has to say.
By Susan Zalkind | Boston Daily | April 24, 2014, 10:12 a.m.
The FBI is pushing back hard against allegations aired Friday on WBUR that the bureau had identified the bombing suspects well before the time authorities have publicly claimed.
Clarence Henniger, the MIT patrol supervisor who first found the bullet-riddled body of slain MIT officer Sean Collier, told researchers who are constructing an oral history of the bombing at Northeastern University that the FBI knew who the Tsarnaevs were and that agents were conducting surveillance on their home in Cambridge around the time that Collier was shot—in stark contradiction to the FBI’s claim that they did not know the bomber’s identities until fingerprinting Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s corpse at the hospital hours later. WBUR included Henniger’s comments as part of a story about the manhunt, and the blog Privacy SOS first noted the contradiction four days later.
In response, Assistant Special Agent In Charge of the Boston office, Kieran Ramsey, told Boston that Henniger is “absolutely uninformed” and that his claims are “patently false. We did not know the identities of the Tsarnaev brothers until after [Tamerlan] was fingerprinted.”
Late afternoon on the Thursday after the bombings, FBI and police officials released photos of the suspects, at the time known only as “Suspect 1” and “Suspect 2,” and asked for the public’s help in identifying them. Hours later, chaos erupted. Those of us in Boston are all too familiar with what happened next: The two brothers allegedly shot Collier to death before hijacking a car and throwing homemade grenades at police in a Watertown shootout.
This is not the first time the FBI denied knowing who the Tsarnaevs were before Collier was shot. Last October, Republican Senator from Iowa Charles Grassley asked the FBI in a public letter why there was increased FBI activity in the Cambridge area before Collier was killed. “Was the surveillance being conducted in Cambridge on either of the Tsarnaev brothers, their associates, or people later confirmed to be their acquaintances?” asked Grassley. In response, the FBI issued a statement saying, “No one was surveilling the Tsarnaevs and they were not identified until after the shootout. Any claims to the contrary are false.”
Despite the FBI’s strong assertions, Henniger stands by his story and says he still has lingering doubts about what the feds knew and when. “We still have questions,” he says, “and to some degree I’m sure [the FBI] knew.”
To that, says Ramsey, “That MIT officer could not be more wrong.”
Read the full article at:
http://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/blog/2014/04/24/fbi-official-tsarnaev-allegations-patently-false/
Girlfriend of Alleged Tamerlan Tsarnaev Accomplice Arrested in Florida
ReplyDeleteTatiana Gruzdeva, the girlfriend of Ibragim Todashev, said she’s going to be deported for talking to the press.
By Susan Zalkind, Boston Daily
October 1, 2013
Tatiana Gruzdeva, the girlfriend of Ibragim Todashev—the man shot by the FBI just after allegedly implicating himself and marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev in a 2011 triple murder in Waltham—has been arrested in Florida by Department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. In a collect call from Glades County Jail, where she said she is being held in solitary confinement, Tatiana Gruzdeva said that immigration officers told her she was being deported because of her interviews with Boston magazine.
The Glades County Sheriff’s Office confirmed that Gruzdeva is being held in the county jail.
Gruzdeva, 19, said she had gone to sign work papers at the local immigrations office at 11 p.m. Tuesday. She had been waiting for weeks for the work authorization form that would allow her to earn a living. Instead, she said, she was taken aside and arrested. “They said it’s because of interview,” she said. “I’m in the room by myself,” she said repeatedly, crying.
Gruzdeva gave an exclusive interview to Boston magazine on September 18, in which she shared details of Todashev’s last days before being shot by the FBI. She told of learning of his death in May while being held in solitary confinement by immigration officials, part of a months-long detention. She was finally released in August, her visa extended for a year. She also broke the news to Boston magazine that her friend and roommate, Ashurmamad Miraliev—who had also been friends with Todashev—had been arrested and questioned by the FBI.
The Council on American Islamic Relations then issued a press release condemning Miraliev’s arrest and alleging that the FBI denied Miraliev’s requests for an attorney while questioning him about Todashev for six hours. The arrest, CAIR alleged, was part of the FBI’s systematic harassment of Todashev’s friends.
An ICE representative could not be reached due to the federal shutdown.
http://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/blog/2013/10/01/tatiana-gruzdeva-arrested-to-be-deported/
Clarence Henniger describes the mood on campus in the early evening of Thursday, April 18th, and his interactions with Sean Collier over the course of several hours. Sean was a member of his squad, a young officer he worked with five days a week and who felt like family to him. In Clarence’s view, Sean was a “great police officer” who enjoyed helping people and every aspect of police work. A young man himself, Sean became closely involved with the MIT EMTs, a group of about sixty volunteer student ambulance drivers on campus.
ReplyDeleteClarence relates how he discovered a severely injured and dying Sean, slumped over in his police cruiser shortly after 10:00pm. Although he had just seen Sean minutes before as he was returning to the office, he went back to look for him after a dispatcher tried unsuccessfully to reach him following reports of loud banging noises in the area where Sean was patrolling. He immediately called for help: “Officer down! Get me medical! Get me back-up! Officer down!” Clarence goes on to describe the harrowing period that followed as he and others attempted to resuscitate Sean, who was then taken by ambulance to Massachusetts General Hospital. As Clarence worked to secure the crime scene, state and Cambridge police, as well as members of the press, all converged on the scene within ten minutes of his call for help. Returning to the police station, he spent the rest of the night being interviewed by various law enforcement agencies. During this period, he along with others at the station, learned about the shoot out in Watertown. Later, heading home about 5:45 am, he saw the entire HOV lane of the Mass Pike filled with police officers from departments across the states responding to the call for reinforcements.
Clarence describes the massive police presence on the MIT campus that night, and the alerts sent urging everyone to remain in their dorms because of an emergency on campus. In the days and weeks that followed, the police department provided trauma support and on-going counseling, especially to the six officers who discovered Sean Collier.
Audio Clip 2
Sergeant Henniger describes finding Officer Collier on the evening of April 18th.
http://marathon.neu.edu/wburoralhistoryproject/clarence_henniger
It was reported in Wicked Local, the Cambridge newspaper that the cruiser was destroyed. You assume one or both the Tsarnaevs assassinated Officer Collier, but there has been no evidence of that shown as yet. It's more likely that the armed robbery at the 7/11 store, less than one mile and mere minutes before Colliers death, is the connecting factor. Just recently a Cambridge police officer has reached out to the public for information on the possible identity of that robber. Police scanner audio reports the description of the armed robber as a 200 lb white or Hispanic man in a cowboy hat. A witness to the Collier crime scene reported a black man, 120 lb. 5' 7" running away. So, two men - cowboy hat, and black man with small build. Maybe these are the individuals seen in the surveillance video. There's reasonable doubt here.
MIT police officer Sergeant Clarence Henniger says that the FBI knew who the Tsarnaevs were before Collier was shot. Describing the mood in Cambridge on the evening of April 18, before his colleague was killed, Henniger says: "The word was out, regarding the suspects. We know how they looked like, and we knew that they lived in the city of Cambridge at one point…We knew that his house was under surveillance, and the Feds were all over the city of Cambridge…knowing that he, they lived there. So we were aware of that."
ReplyDeleteThe first public hint about this surveillance operation came in an October 15, 2013 letter from Senator Chuck Grassley, ranking member on the Senate Judiciary Committee, to FBI director James Comey. The Republican Senator asked disturbing questions about the FBI’s knowledge of the Tsarnaevs, including whether the FBI attempted "to use the tactic of ‘recruitment’ or a sting operation with Tamerlan Tsarnaev".
The Senator asked director Comey to explain what was going on that night in Cambridge. "Was the surveillance being conducted in Cambridge on either of the Tsarnaev brothers, their associates or people later confirmed to be their acquaintances?"
On Friday, October 18, 2013, three days after the Grassley letter was made public, the FBI’s Boston field office issued a joint statement with the heads of the Massachusetts State Police and the Boston Police Department, denying outright that the FBI was watching the Tsarnaevs on the night of April 18. That statement reads:
Members of the Joint Terrorism Task Force did not know their identities until shortly after Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s death when they fingerprinted his corpse. Nor did the Joint Terrorism Task Force have the Tsarnaevs under surveillance at any time after the Assessment of Tamerlan Tsarnaev was closed in 2011. The Joint Terrorism Task Force was at M.I.T., located in Cambridge, MA, on April 18, 2013, on a matter unrelated to the Tsarnaev brothers. Additionally, the Tsarnaev brothers were never sources for the FBI nor did the FBI attempt to recruit them as sources.
There has been recent reporting relating to whether or not the FBI, Boston Police, Massachusetts State Police or other members of the Joint Terrorism Task Force knew the identities of the bombers before the shootout with the alleged marathon bombing suspects, and were conducting physical surveillance of them on April 18, 2013. These claims have been repeatedly refuted by the FBI, Boston Police, and Massachusetts State Police.
To be absolutely clear: No one was surveilling the Tsarnaevs and they were not identified until after the shootout. Any claims to the contrary are false.
The FBI states unequivocally that its agents were not surveilling the Tsarnaev brothers on the night of the 18th, and that its agents were in Cambridge that night "on a matter unrelated to the Tsarnaev brothers." But this statement doesn’t only contradict MIT officer Henniger’s comments to WBUR. It also contradicts what the FBI told 60 Minutes about bureau operations after the Boston Marathon attacks. According to CBS reporter Scott Pelley, then-FBI director Bob Mueller "ordered every single FBI office in the world"—not just those in Boston, Massachusetts, or the United States—to back up the Boston office’s investigation.
If that’s true, how could the FBI have been running a massive surveillance operation in Cambridge just days after the bombings if it were related to an "unrelated matter", as the FBI claims? Is it possible that the FBI has been misleading the public about what it knew about the Tsarnaevs, and when? Absolutely.
https://privacysos.org/blog/mit-police-officers-statement-suggests-fbi-was-watching-tsarnaevs-the-night-sean-collier-was-killed/
THEY KNEW DZHOKHAR DIDN'T HAVE A WEAPON
ReplyDeleteEven though most law enforcement had left the Watertown area, Chief Merner had a good reason to stick around. He received a tip from a homeowner that he had spotted blood on his boat.
“We immediately responded to this area on Franklin Street, and when we got there, we saw the boat and we saw blood on the boat,” Merner said. “The call is going out that there’s a resident who says he found blood on his boat and you hear us quickly say, ‘We’re already here.’”
“I asked the owner if he had pulled the top back, he said yes, he had. I asked him if he saw somebody, he said, ‘Yes, he appeared to be injured.’ I asked him if he was armed, he said ‘He didn’t appear to be armed at that time,’” Merner recalled. “I covered it from one side, Lieutenant O’ Connor covered it from the other, and Superintendent Evans assumed command of the operation, the takedown at the boat.”
When Merner arrived, there were only three of them there. With no SWAT team and only two other officers on scene, Merner started going right for the Boston bomber.
“My first instinct was to apprehend this individual who had just murdered three people and injured 264 others in my city,” Merner said.
VS: CNN evans talking hereSo with me at that time was Lieutenant Merner, Lieutenant O'Connor.
So the Boston police continued to search while some of the other -- you know, well after the governor had removed the ban. So our problem at that time is residents were coming out. And the officers were asking, how shall we deal with the residents? And we made it clear, as courteous and as professional as possible, yet getting the job done.
So 15 minutes went by. I called captain John Dougan, who was in charge of one of the quadrants. And I said, John, how are you doing? He said, boss, give me five more minutes. It was at that point when we were standing at the corner of the original site. Our officers were still out there searching when -- we were standing next to the Watertown officer. We heard that the call come in, and he told us -- he didn't hold us. We heard him say we just got a call from a man in the back of a house on a boat.
We hopped into out car. We followed the Watertown officer down because he was more familiar with the area. And at that time, we hopped out of the car, and we all got into the driveway, and we set up a perimeter around that boat. And that's how we got to the scene.
QUESTION: Were there shots fired when you entered the driveway?
EVANS: No, there wasn't shots fired when we entered the driveway.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2015/03/11/robert-merner-boston-top-detective-leaving-for-same-job-seattle-police-department/DlHYTEQJ2sWVKWqmjWXftO/story.html
http://www.sasnet.com/bostonstrategy/players/01_police/05_merner.html
Police: No detonations necessary at Norfolk Street address where Boston Marathon suspects lived
ReplyDeleteBy Brian Ballou and Wesley Lowery
Globe Staff | 04.19.13 | 5:50 PM
CAMBRIDGE—The “controlled explosions” that bomb technicians had planned to conduct on Norfolk Street near Inman Square were not necessary, according to the State Police. Authorities had been concerned that a car near the home where the brothers suspected of being the Boston Marathon bombers had recently lived contained an explosive, but it did not, according to state police.
The scene was declared to be “clear” around 5 p.m. Police would not comment on whether any thing was found in the brothers’ home.
Earlier in the afternoon, State Police Colonel Timothy Alben told reporters that the planned explosions by bomb disposal technicians were meant to protect the law enforcement officials searching through the residence and neighborhood where Dzhokar A. Tsarnaev and his older brother, Tamerlan were residents.
The two men are accused of building at least two bombs that were sent off near the finish line at the Boston Marathon on Monday, killing three people and wounding more than 170.
Authorities closed off Norfolk Street between Cambridge and Webster streets near Inman Square early Friday morning, and police escorted residents from their homes and scoured the area around the suspects’ apartment. Many neighbors and some nearby business owners reflected on what they knew about the pair.
Gilberto Junior, 44, the owner of Junior’s Autobody in Somerville on Columbia Road, said Dzhokar A. Tsarnaev had dropped off a white Mercedes station wagon two weeks ago to have the bumper repaired. Junior said he hadn’t yet touched the vehicle when Dzhokar A. Tsarnaev returned Tuesday afternoon demanding the car.
Junior said that Tsarnaev appeared to be nervous, sitting down and biting his nails with his knees shaking, so much so that he thought he had been “popping pills.”
Junior told him that he wasn’t finished with the car, but says that the younger Tsarnaev emphatically replied: “I need it now.”
Junior, who is from Brazil, said the suspect often dropped off vehicles to get fixed, and he always paid in cash.
Junior described him as a very nice, likeable man and added he was shocked upon learning that he was connected to the bombings.
There were some tense moments around Norfolk Street today. At about 10 a.m., officials pushed media and residents back away from the scene down to Tremont Street, and then even further away. The intense focus continued into mid-morning and police appeared to be getting reinforcements from the military. Shortly after 10:30 a.m., a small convoy of military vehicles, apparently from the Massachusetts National Guard, streamed into the neighborhood, with soldiers dressed in full combat gear.
People curious about the police activity came out of their homes and shops on Cambridge Street and gathered to see what was going on, taking photos with their cellphones. Families walked through the crowds, some in their pajamas, clearly roused from their sleep.
Dozens of journalists assembled across the street, their camera lenses focused on the activity. Residents expressed shock that the suspects lived so close by. Numerous onlookers congregated at all corners of the intersection. Shops in the area and throughout Cambridge are closed except for a Shell gas station on Cambridge street, roughly three blocks away from Norfolk Street.
CONTINUED...
Peter Hanley, 31, a software engineer at Fidelity Investments in Boston, said police knocked on his door at 8 a.m. Hanley said he was “spooked” and extremely worried about his and other residents’ safety. He said there were a few houses on the street with teenagers, and that the suspects didn’t stand out.
ReplyDeleteDeana Beaulieu, 20, of Cambridge, said she has known one of the suspects since seventh grade at Community Charter School of Cambridge in Kendall Square, a small school. They both went on to Cambridge Rindge and Latin. When she woke up Friday morning and heard the news, and then someone posted his high school yearbook photo on Instagram, she immediately recognized him. “We used to call him ‘Jahar,’ “ she said. “We didn’t really know how to pronounce his name.”
“He was just quiet,” she said.
In charter school, she said that he “kept to himself, he wasn’t really the outgoing type. He wasn’t really popular. They were a nice family. I don’t remember meeting his parents, but I did meet his sister, and she was really nice.”
Beaulieu said she last saw him at the school’s 2011 graduation. She described him as a quiet, almost shy guy who participated on the wrestling team.
Ty Barros, 21, of Cambridge, has been a friend of Dzhokar Tsarnaev’s older sister, Elena, for the past several years. But Barros said he also hung out with Dzhokar Tsarnaev during their high school years.
Their main activity, he said, was smoking marijuana and drinking alcohol, Barros said.
He also said they both attended the Islamic Society of Boston mosque on nearby Prospect Street.
But long-time members of the mosque today said they could not remember ever seeing him there. The members sternly rebuked any notion that their religion played a role in the bombings.
Ali Shambaz, 26, of Somerville, said “Every religion has its own fanatics and there are always those people who are crazy.”
Shambaz, a student at Bunker Hill Community College, walked into the mosque for a noontime prayer.
Sheith Sadeddin, 17, of Medford, said that he has been coming to the mosque his entire life. He said the Friday services are usually packed with about 150 to 200 people.
“We are all shocked here,” he said. “This doesn’t define Islam. We’re not about that, we’re about peace.”
http://www.boston.com/metrodesk/2013/04/19/police-search-apartment-norfolk-street-near-inman-square-cambridge/kaOkpHjKHLVhHce9ESIBbN/story.html