A group of people who were evacuated from their homes on Norfolk Street in Cambridge.
Reuters/Washington
The two suspects in the Boston Marathon bombings are ethnic Chechen brothers who spent much of their lives away from the Russian republic and showed few signs of radicalism in the US, friends and relatives say.
Much is still unknown about Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, Cambridge residents identified by a national security official as suspects in the bombings that killed three people and wounded 176 on Monday.
Tamerlan, 26, who dreamed of Olympic boxing glory, was killed in a shootout late on Thursday.
Dzhokhar, 19, described as a low-profile student in high school, was the target of a massive manhunt yesterday.
The men’s uncle, Ruslan Tsarni, said he had not spoken with them since 2009 and urged Dzhokhar to turn himself in.
“He put a shame on our family. He put a shame on the entire Chechen ethnicity,” Tsarni said outside his home in suburban Washington.
Asked what was behind the attack, Tsarni said: “I say what I think what’s behind it – being losers. Not being able to settle themselves and thereby hating everyone who did.”
Dzhokhar said on his page on VK, a Russian-language social media site, that he went to primary school in Makhachkala, the capital of Dagestan, a province in Russia’s Caucasus region that borders Chechnya.
He graduated in 2011 from Cambridge Rindge & Latin School, a public school near Harvard University in Cambridge. His “World view” is listed as “Islam” and his “personal priority” is “career and money”.
He had enrolled at University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, and a high school classmate, Eric Machado, told CNN that Dzhokhar had shown no “tell-tale signs of malicious behaviour”.
“We partied. We hung out. We were good high school friends,” he said.
Machado recalled that Dzhokhar once said something in conversation about terrorism, but there was “no evidence that would lead any of us to believe that he would be capable of this”.
Luke O’Neill, 21, a neighbour in Cambridge, said he had last seen the younger man this past winter. He said the family kept to themselves and he often would see Dzhokhar walking alone.
But although an unidentified former classmate described Dzhokhar to Boston television station WBZ as the “class clown”, his VK page showed links to Islamic websites and others calling for Chechen independence.
School officials in Dagestan said the family had left for the US in March 2002 before after arriving the previous year from Kyrgyzstan as refugees.
“The children – there were four of them – were admitted to the School No. 1,” the headmaster, Emirmagomed Davydov, told Reuters Television. “The whole family arrived together and left together.”
US officials said the brothers were in the US legally.
Tamerlan, the older brother, had been a part-time accounting student at Bunker Hill Community College. He was enrolled there for three semesters – fall 2006, spring 2007 and fall 2008.
Tamerlan devoted himself to boxing. After winning a Golden Gloves bout in nearby Lowell, Massachusetts, in 2004, he told the local newspaper: “I like the USA ... America has a lot of jobs.”
“That’s something Russia doesn’t have. You have a chance to make money here if you are willing to work,” he added.
But Tamerlan Tsarnaev expressed some frustration with the US in a 2010 profile in The Comment magazine published by Boston University’s School of Communications.
The article quotes Tsarnaev as saying that, although he had lived in the US for five years, “I don’t have a single American friend. I don’t understand them”.
He neither smoked nor drank. He told the magazine: “God said no alcohol.”
Boston bomb suspects ‘unknown in Chechnya’, says leader, laying blame on their lives in America
Two ethnically-Chechen brothers suspected of carrying out the Boston Marathon bombings had no connection with Chechnya, the leader of the mainly Muslim region in Russia said yesterday, blaming their US upbringing.
“They grew up in America, their views and convictions were formed there. The roots of evil must be sought in America,” the strongman leader of the North Caucasus republic, Ramzan Kadyrov, wrote on his Instagram account.
While expressing condolences to the American people, he nonetheless criticised US law enforcement authorities for killing the elder brother Tamerlan Tsarnaev, saying that “it would have been logical to detain him and hold an investigation”.
“Evidently the special services needed a result at any cost to calm down society,” he wrote.
Kadyrov earlier told the RIA Novosti news agency: “We do not know the Tsarnaevs. They did not live in Chechnya. They lived and studied in America. What happened in America is the fault of the American special services.”
“It has become typical to link everything that happens in the world to Chechens, to blame the Chechens, even for the tsunami,” complained the leader, known for his outspoken remarks.