The FBI in 2011 interviewed one of the brothers suspected in the deadly
Boston Marathon bombings, a disclosure that raises questions about
whether the government missed potential warning signs about the men's
behavior.
The brothers had not been under surveillance as possible militants, U.S.
government officials said.
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.
"The request stated that it was based on information that he was a
follower of radical Islam and a strong believer, and that he had changed
drastically since 2010 as he prepared to leave the United States for
travel to the country's region to join unspecified underground groups,"
the FBI statement said.
The matter was closed because interviews with Tamerlan and family
members "did not find any terrorism activity, domestic or foreign".
Tamerlan Tsarnaev was killed early Friday in Boston after an
overnight shootout with police. His younger brother, Dzhokhar, was taken
into custody on Friday evening in the Boston suburb of Watertown after a
dramatic, day-long manhunt, Boston police said.
Bleeding and in serious condition, Dzhokhar is in a Boston hospital, a Massachusetts State Police spokesman said.
A spokeswoman for Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, Kelly
Lawman, confirmed on Saturday that Tsarnaev was being treated there,
but declined comment on his condition.
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.
In an interview with Russian state television broadcaster RT, the mother
of the bombing brothers said Tamerlan, the older of the two suspects,
had been under FBI surveillance for at least three years.
Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, who was killed in a shootout with police a day
before his brother’s capture yesterday, was accessing extremist sites
and was closely monitored by the FBI, Zubeidat Tsarnaeva said in a phone
interview in English from Makhachkala, in the southern Russian region
of Dagestan, posted on the channel’s website.
“My son would never do this,” Tsarnaeva said. “He was controlled by the
FBI for three to five years, they knew what my son was doing, they knew
what actions, on what sites on the Internet he was going,” she said. “So
how could this happen? They were controlling every step of his.”
Tsarnaeva, whose younger son Dzhokar, 19, was captured after an almost
24-hour manhunt that shut down Boston and surrounding cities, said she
had been interviewed by Federal Bureau of Investigation agents about
Tamerlan, who had described him as an “extremist leader.”
The brothers’ father, Anzor, in an interview with The Wall Street
Journal, said he was present when the FBI interviewed Tamerlan in
Cambridge. He said they visited for what they called “prevention”
activities.
“They said: 'We know what sites you are on, we know where you are
calling, we know everything about you. Everything,'” he said as cited in
the interview.
Tamerlan, a legal resident of the U.S., flew out of the country on a
flight bound for Russia in January 2012 and may not have returned until
July, said two law enforcement officials briefed on his travel.
U.S. intelligence agencies reviewing international communications and
other terrorism intelligence found no signs that the suspected bombers
were members of, or inspired by, any foreign terror group, said a U.S.
official who asked not to be identified because those matters are
classified.
The Tsarnaev brothers and their two sisters moved to the Dagestan region
of Russia in October 2001 from the central Asian nation of Kyrgyzstan
as refugees, and left for the U.S in March 2002, said Emirmagomed
Davudov, director of Gimnasium Number 1 in Dagestan, where Tamerlan went
to the seventh grade and Dzhokhar to first grade.
Ruslan Tsarni, their uncle in Gaithersburg, Maryland, said his brother’s
children arrived in Cambridge when they immigrated in 2003. Asked for a
possible motive for the attacks, Tsarni said they were “losers not
being able to settle themselves and thereby just hating everybody who
did.”
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.
The brothers were in the United States legally. But Tamerlan Tsarnaev
could have been deported after an alleged domestic violence arrest in
2009,
the website Judicial Watch reports.
It is unclear whether Tsarnaev was convicted in the case, but the
arrest alone would have been sufficient for deportation, the site
reports.
Tsarnaev came to this country in 2006 on a tourist visa, which means his
alleged crime occurred within his first five years in the U.S.
According to Federal Immigration Law, anyone who commits a crime of
“moral turpitude,” including violent crimes such as assault and
battery, during the first five years after being admitted to the country
can be deported if the crime was punishable by a one-year jail
sentence.
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.