Samstwitch
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Boston suspect was under FBI surveillance, mother says
MOSCOW (Reuters) - One of the two ethnic Chechens suspected by U.S. officials of being behind the Boston Marathon bombings had been under FBI surveillance for at least three years, his mother said.
Zubeidat Tsarnaeva told the English-language Russia Today state television station in a phone interview, a recording of which was obtained by Reuters, that she believed her sons were innocent and had been framed.
Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, was killed in a shootout with police and his 19-year-old brother Dzhokhar was captured after a day-long manhunt.
"He (Tamerlan) was 'controlled' by the FBI, like, for three to five years," she said, speaking in English and using the direct English translation of a word in Russian that means monitored.
"They knew what my son was doing, they knew what sites on the Internet he was going to," she said in what Russia Today described as a call from Makhachkala, where she lives in Russia's Dagestan region after returning from the United States.
Tsarnaeva echoed the boys' father, Anzor, who said on Friday that he believed they had been framed. Both suggested in separate interviews that the FBI had made no secret of the fact that at least one of the brothers was being watched.
"I do not believe that my sons could have planned and organized the terrorist act, because they knew U.S. national security services were keeping an eye on them," Anzor Tsarnaev told Russia's Channel One television.
"They (the security services) said 'We know what you eat, what you read on the Internet'," he said, without making clear how the security officers had made contact.
In her interview with Russia Today, Tsarnaeva suggested FBI officers had visited her home when she still lived in the United States and told her that Tamerlan "was really an extremist leader and that they were afraid of him."
"It is really, really a hard thing to hear. And being a mother, what I can say is that I am really sure, I am, like, 100 percent sure, that this is a set-up," she said.
She did not say whether the FBI had started to take an interest in Tamerlan although she also referred to the security services' interest in what Internet sites he visited.
U.S. government officials have said the brothers were not under surveillance as possible militants.
But the FBI said in a statement on Friday that in 2011 it interviewed Tamerlan at the request of a foreign government, which it did not identify.
It said the matter was closed because interviews with Tamerlan and family members "did not find any terrorism activity, domestic or foreign".
The FBI statement was the first evidence that the family had come to security officials' attention after they emigrated to the United States from Dagestan about a decade ago.
It is not clear when Tsarnaeva and her husband left the United States.
FBI interviewed Boston bombing suspect in 2011: source
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The FBI interviewed suspected Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev in early 2011, it said in a statement late Friday, following a tip from a foreign government that he was "a follower of radical Islam" and was preparing to leave the United States to join underground organizations.
The FBI said its interview two years ago of Tsarnaev and his family, along with checks of travel records, Internet activity and personal associations, "did not find any terrorism activity" at the time.
But the revelation is the first evidence that the Tsarnaev family came to U.S. security officials' attention after they emigrated to the United States about a decade ago, and it could raise questions about whether the government missed potential warning signs about the behavior of two brothers.
Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, died overnight in Boston in a shootout with police. His younger brother, Dzhokhar, 19, was taken into custody on Friday evening in the Boston suburb of Watertown after a dramatic, day-long manhunt, Boston police said.
The FBI statement did not disclose which foreign government asked it for information about the brothers and their family. But Tamerlan was widely reported to have made a trip to Russia last year.
The brothers and their family were ethnic Chechens, whose small republic's attempts at independence following the collapse of the Soviet Union were brutally crushed by Moscow. Both brothers, however, were born in the Central Asian state of Kyrgyzstan, the FBI statement said, and Dzhokhar was a naturalized U.S. citizen.
The revelation that the elder Tsarnaev was on U.S. law enforcement authorities' radar screens seemed likely to raise uncomfortable questions for the Obama administration about whether it could have done anything to detect and stop the plot.
"It's new information to me and it's very disturbing that he's on the FBI radar screen," Rep. Michael McCaul, Texas Republican and chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, said on CNN late Friday.
It is not known when the Boston Marathon bombings were planned, or whether there were clues that could have allowed authorities to pre-empt it.
National security and law enforcement authorities said on earlier Friday that they had not turned up any evidence that the Tsarnaevs had contacts with al Qaeda or other militants overseas.
Rep. Peter King, New York Republican and member of the House intelligence committee, said in a statement that there "was no federal intelligence or chatter prior to the marathon bombings," a reference to militant communications often picked up in advance of an impending attack.
The U.S. officials said they were leaning toward the theory that the bombings were motivated by Islamic extremism, although that remained unproven.
WERE THE TSARNAEVS WORKING WITH OTHERS?
Violent plots involving a single individual or small groups who self-radicalize and have minimal dealings with other militants can be extremely difficult to detect in advance, according to U.S. counterterrorism officials and private experts.
The revelation about the FBI contacts with the elder Tsarnaev came as U.S. officials told Reuters that investigators are scouring government data banks to determine if spy and police agencies missed potential clues that might have alerted them to the two brothers.
Another top priority for investigators is to determine whether the brothers had any confederates either inside the United States or overseas, one U.S. official said. This official and others spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation.
Three people were taken into custody for questioning in New Bedford, Massachusetts, police said on Friday. Two men and a woman are being questioned by the FBI "on the assumption there is an affiliation with" Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Lieutenant Robert Richard of the New Bedford Police said.
One official said the possibility that the U.S. government had information that should have raised questions about the Tsarnaev brothers before the attack could not be ruled out. Other officials said they were unaware that such material had turned up.
In several recent cases, U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies failed to put together clues that, in hindsight, might have led them to pre-empt a plot.
In 2009, U.S. Army Maj. Nidal Hassan killed 13 people and wounded another 32 at Fort Hood, Texas. Prior to the shooting spree, Hassan had email contacts with Anwar al-Awlaki, the U.S.-born cleric and leader of al Qaida's affiliate in Yemen who was later killed in a U.S. drone strike.
U.S. authorities had investigated Hassan's emails, but concluded they posed no threat of violence.
The father of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the so-called "underwear bomber" who tried to bring down a U.S. jetliner over Detroit on Christmas Day 2009, reported suspicions about his son's activities to the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria. But Abdulmutallab's U.S. visa was never revoked.
A report by the Senate intelligence committee heavily criticized U.S. intelligence agencies for failing to act on available information in that case.
But Brian Jenkins, a respected terrorism expert at the RAND Corp., dismissed the idea that the Boston bombings represented an intelligence failure.
People will inevitably ask, "did we miss something in intelligence?" said Jenkins, speaking before the news of the 2011 FBI interview with Tamerlan Tsarnaev become public.
"Some people will label it an 'intelligence failure.' But that's because people have come to expect 100 percent security," he said.