Boston bombing: search for evidence continues

FBI agents travelled to Dagestan on Wednesday to interview the parents of the surviving bomb suspect. His father Anzor Tsarnaev is now expected to travel to the United States as early as Friday. He insists he wants “justice” for his sons.

He and his former wife Zubeidat spoke to reporters on Thursday from the city of Makhachkala in southern Russia. “I don’t have any bad intentions. I don’t
plan to blow up anything”, he insisted. “I am not angry at anyone, I want to go find out the truth”.

The suspects’ mother, however, is unlikely to head for America. She was arrested for alleged shoplifting and damage to property in Massachusetts – but
jumped bail when she returned to Russia. An arrest warrant has been outstanding since October.

She claimed she had called her oldest son Tamerlan after the bombing and he had told her not to worry – declaring she was considering giving up her American
citizenship.

Meanwhile the authorities continue to gather evidence for their case against Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, trying to find out what motivated him and build their case for prosecution.

According to reports, their task could be proving more difficult: according to officials, the 19-year-old stopping communicating with them after he was advised of his right to remain silent. His alleged confession came before those rights were read to him on Monday, and some have questioned whether that makes it admissible in a trial.

Building the case: a slow process

The Christian Science Monitor reports that the trial could still be many months away. There will be thousands of pages of witness statements, hours of video images, countless phone images to trawl through.

In trials involving the death penalty, a mitigation specialist will be asked to come up with reasons to oppose it, including a psychological profile and testimony from people who knew Tsarnaev.

Defence lawyers could mount a series of pre-trial challenges, including the issue of when the suspect’s rights were read and where the trial should take place to avoid any issue of bias.

No lack of diligence

Meanwhile more details are emerging about the bombing suspects and their lifestyles. Fox News claims that the FBI has discovered the older brother, Tamerlan, texted his mother in 2011 claiming he was prepared to die for Islam.

It appears that he was placed on a watch list 18 months ago, but when congress met to review the evidence yesterday they said there was nothing to suggest a lack of diligence on the part of the authorities.

That’s what we’ve been fighting against after all the wars of the 20th century. US Secretary of State John Kerry

US Secretary of State John Kerry said that Tamerlan returned from Russia last year with “a willingness to kill people”. He said the world was getting tired of people who had “no belief system, no policy for jobs, no policy for rule of law, but who just want to kill people because they don’t like what they see”.

“There’s no room for that,” he went on. “That’s what we’ve been fighting against after all of the wars of the 20th century.”

Side businesses

It seems more and more clear that the Tsarnaev brothers were far from being highly trained and highly resourced. Acquaintances told the Boston Globe that Dzhokhar sold marijuana to fund himself through college, and had some kind of side business involving repairing damaged cars.

Tamerlan relied on his American wife to bring in the family income: theirs was no lavish lifestyle, and they had resorted to state benefits for some of their time together.

The Boston Globe called the attack “terrorism on a budget”: this was, they estimated, an attack that could easily have been carried out for less than $100 a bomb.

House judiciary chairman Bob Goodlatte says their inestigations will focus on whether there was any breakdown in information sharing which could have alerted the authorities sooner. The Senate will be briefed later on Thursday.

Felicity Spector writes about US affairs for Channel 4 News