BOSTON, April 25 (UPI) — Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokar Tsarnaev was unarmed when police fired on him as he hid in a boat before his arrest, law enforcement officials said.
U.S. officials also said the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service contacted the CIA and the FBI about marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, who was killed in a shootout with the police April 19, four days after the marathon bombing that killed three people and injured 282 others.
Tamerlan Tsarnaev “had changed drastically since 2010” and was preparing to travel to a part of Russia “to join unspecified underground groups,” said a one-page request from the intelligence service, cited by The New York Times, that was sent to the FBI in March 2011 and to the CIA in September 2011.
U.S. authorities told Russian intelligence authorities they had no suspicious information about the man, but they put Tamerlan Tsarnaev on two separate government watch lists late that year that were supposed to alert authorities if he traveled overseas.
One of the databases, the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, or TIDE, contains about 700,000 names and is the source for information for other government watch lists — including the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Database and the Transportation Security Administration’s “no fly” list.
When Tamerlan Tsarnaev left the United States Jan. 12, 2012, for a six-month trip to Dagestan and Chechnya — predominantly Muslim republics in Russia’s North Caucasus region, –his flight reservation set off a security alert to customs authorities, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano told a Senate committee Tuesday.
It evidently did not set off a TIDE alert because the spelling variants of his name and the birth dates entered into the system — variants Russia included in its warnings — were different enough from the correct information to bypass an alert, a U.S. official told the Times.
Russian officials contacted the FBI in March 2011, and then contacted the CIA six months later, citing in both cases concerns the older Tsarnaev was associating with extremists, U.S. officials told several news organizations.
The FBI would not discuss what prompted the gunfire just before the capture of Dzhokar Tsarnaev, 19.
Law enforcement officials told The Washington Post the half-hour before the arrest was chaotic.
One characterized it as “the fog of war” and said in that highly charged environment, a single accidental shot could have caused “contagious fire.”
Other law enforcement officials told the Post some action may have led officers to think Dzhokar Tsarnaev was about to detonate explosives.
He had been the subject of a massive manhunt all day and was cornered just before nightfall hiding in a boat in the driveway of a house in Watertown, Mass.
“They probably didn’t know whether he had a gun,” one law enforcement official told the Post. “Hours earlier, he and his brother had killed a police officer, shot another officer and thrown explosives out of their cars as the police were chasing them. They couldn’t assume that he did not have a gun and more explosives.”
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