Media Maddow: ‘Something weird is going on’ in FBI shooting of Ibragim Todashev

Samstwitch

Senior Member
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Maddow: ‘Something weird is going on’ in FBI shooting of Ibragim Todashev

May 31, 2013 - On Thursday night’s edition of “The Rachel Maddow Show,” host Rachel Maddow discussed the swirl of questions around the shooting of Ibragim Todashev, an associate of Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the two men charged with the bombing of the Boston Marathon.

FBI officials have given conflicting accounts of the questioning and killing of Todashev, who knew Tamerlan Tsarnaev through Mixed Martial Arts fighting. Todashev, who, like the Tsarnaevs, was Chechen, lived in Boston for a time before moving to Florida. Agents from the FBI traveled to Florida to question Todashev repeatedly about the bombing.

“Last week while being questioned again in Florida,” said Maddow, “something went very, very wrong and he ended up dead.”

Law enforcement officials were interviewing Todashev in his apartment in Orlando on Wednesday, May 22, when something occurred that resulted in the young man being shot multiple times.

On Thursday, Todashev’s family held a press conference in Moscow, where they showed autopsie photos of their slain son. Ibragim Todashev was shot six times in the torso and once in the back of the head.

“We have not been able to authenticate these photos,” said Maddow. “No one has.”

But, she said, if they are genuine, “something weird is going on.”

“How does that comport with the FBI’s story that he was killed during questioning by armed agents who were only acting in self defense?” she asked. “Shot seven times, including in the back of the head?”

Todashev was questioned because of a possible connection to a bizarre 2011 murder in Waltham, Massachusetts in which three men were found with their throats cut, covered in marijuana, with $5,000 in cash untouched nearby. Law enforcement officials theorize now that Tamerlan Tsarnaev may have murdered the men with the help of some other person or persons.

“That cold case got hot again” after the marathon bombing, Maddow said. Tamerlan Tsarnaev was close friends with one of the victims, but, after his murder, Tsarnaev declined to attend his friend’s funeral.

After Todashev was shot during questioning, Maddow said, law enforcement officials “leaked an elaborate story” that purported to justify the killing. The officials also claimed that Todashev had implicated himself in the Waltham murders prior to being shot. They said that just before the man was about to sign a confession, he snapped, and “lunged at the interrogator with a blade.”

“That initial story has fallen apart,” Maddow said. Within 12 hours of the shooting, two of the three law enforcement officials who were talking to the media about the case changed their story, saying they were no longer sure whether Todashev had a knife.

Now, multiple sources have come forward to papers like the Washington Post to say that, in fact, Todashev was unarmed. NBC News reported on Thursday that Todashev may have been brandishing some kind of “metal rod.”

“So they shot him seven times?” Maddow asked, “Including in the back of the head?” She added that no one actually knows right now if that was the actual number of gunshot wounds on Todashev’s body since officials will neither confirm nor deny that the post-autopsy photos are accurate.

“What we’re left with here is a baffling mess and a story that does not make sense,” she said.

This story stinks of cover-up and lies!
 

Khaos

where the wild things are
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From what I have heard, he became aggressive after they presented a confession paper for him to sign. And they took that as a threat and shot him dead right there. My opinion? I think they were trying to get him to sign the confession paper, he refused and they intimidated him into an aggressive stance that justifies them shooting him dead.
 

Samstwitch

Senior Member
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5,111
The FBI Changes Its Story (Again) on the Ibragim Todashev Shooting

Law enforcement officials are still trying to explain how a supposedly peaceful interview with an important witness in the Boston bombing case turned into a deadly shooting, but as usual, every new attempt to explain the death of Ibragim Todashev only raises more troubling questions. After originally accusing the suspect and potential murderous accomplice of Boston bomber Tamleran Tsarnaev of attacking an FBI agent with a knife, and then walking back that claim entirely, an new anonymous source says Todashev, may have injured the agent with a table and a metal pole. Or maybe not.

Here's the way the attack was described in The New York Times. Everyone seems to agree that after several hours of interrogation, Todashev was prepared to confess to an unsolved murder that he and Tamerlan Tsarnaev were connected to. Then thing get a lot less clear:

At that moment, Mr. Todashev picked up the table and threw it at the agent, knocking him to the ground. While trying to stand up, the agent, who suffered a wound to his face from the table that required stitches, drew his gun and saw Mr. Todashev running at him with a metal pole, according to the official, adding that it might have been a broomstick.

So not only has the story changed again, it has now changed twice in the same sentence. The weapon has no gone from nothing to a knife, back to nothing to a table to a metal pole to a broomstick. Todashev was also apparently shot more than once, after an initial volley of "several shots" somehow failed to bring him down.

Oh, and there's a pretty big difference between a metal pole and a broomstick, and the fact that the Times source can't decide which one it is suggests they don't really know happened either. (CNN reported that Todashev owned a samurai sword that was in the room, but no one has yet suggested that he wielded that at any time.) With at least three witnesses, you're likely to get three different stories and we might never know which, if any of them, is the most accurate.

The new version of event also doesn't answer the question of why the FBI agent immediately began firing his weapon or why the other police officers in the room failed to intervene. Which leaves us right back where we started: A confusing scene, an apparently unnecessary death, and a lot of unanswered questions. And on top of all that, the FBI lost what could have been one of their most valuable sources of information on what the Tsarnaev brothers were really up to before the carried their attack.

RELATED: Man Connected to Boston Marathon Bombers Is Shot and Killed by the FBI
 


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