Police searched for a suspect on Friday in Watertown, Mass. (photo: Eric Thayer/The New York Times)
19 April 13
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of the suspects in the Boston Marathon bombings was killed early Friday
morning after leading the police on a wild chase following the fatal
shooting of a campus police officer, while the other was sought in a
massive manhunt that shut down large parts of the area. Gov. Deval
Patrick of Massachusetts said residents of Boston and its neighboring
communities should "stay indoors, with their doors locked."
The two suspects were identified by law enforcement
officials as brothers from Chechnya. The surviving suspect was
identified as Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev, 19, of Cambridge, Mass., a law
enforcement official said. The one who was killed was identified as his
brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26. The authorities were investigating
whether the dead man had a homemade bomb strapped to his body when he
was killed, two law enforcement officials said.
The manhunt for the surviving bombing suspect sent the
Boston region into the grip of a security emergency: residents of the
city and the surrounding area were urged to stay indoors, as hundreds of
police officers conducted a manhunt and all public transit services was
suspended.
Col. Tim Alben of the Massachusetts State Police said
investigators believed that the two men were responsible for the death
of Massachusetts Institute of Technology police officer and the shooting
of an officer with the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, the
region's transit authority. "We believe these are the same individuals
that were responsible for the bombing on Monday at the Boston Marathon,"
he said.
Officials said that the two men had lived in Chechnya,
a long-disputed, predominantly Muslim territory in southern Russia that
sought independence after the collapse of the Soviet Union and then
fought two bloody wars with the authorities in Moscow.
Russian assaults
on Chechnya were brutal and killed tens of thousands of civilians, as
terrorist groups from the region staged attacks in central Russia. In
recent years, separatist militant groups have gone underground, and
surviving leaders embraced fundamentalist Islam.
The family lived briefly in Makhachkala, the capital
of the Dagestan region, near Chechnya, before moving to the United
States, said a school administrator there. Irina V. Bandurina, secretary
to the director of School No. 1, said the Tsarnaev family left Dagestan
for the United States in 2002 after living there for about a year. She
said the family - parents, two boys and two girls - had lived in the
Central Asian nation of Kyrgyzstan previously.
Both brothers have substantial presence on social
media. On Vkontakte, Russia's most popular social media platform, the
younger brother, Dzhokhar, describes his worldview as "Islam" and, asked
to identify "the main thing in life," answers "career and money." He
lists a series of affinity groups relating to Chechnya, and lists a
verse from the Koran, "Do good, because Allah loves those who do good."
One former schoolmate of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev at
Cambridge Rindge and Latin School described him as "very sweet," adding,
"I never heard anyone say a bad word about him." Another, Meron
Woldemariam, 17, the manager of the school volleyball team that he
played for, said that he had left the team in the middle of the season
to wrestle. She described him as normal - sociable, friendly and fun to
talk to. He was a senior when she was a freshman.
The older brother left a record on YouTube of his
favorite clips, which included Russian rap videos, as well as
testimonial from a young ethnic Russian man titled "How I accepted Islam
and became a Shiite," a clip titled "Seven Steps to Successful Prayer."
Alvi Karimov, the spokesman for Ramzan Kadyrov, leader
of Chechnya, said the Tsarnaev brothers have not lived in Chechnya for
many years. He told the Interfax news service that, according to
preliminary information, the family: "moved to a different region of the
Russian Federation from Chechnya many years ago. Then the family lived
for a long time in Kazakhstan, and from there moved to the United
States, where the members of the family received residency permits."
"In such a way, the figures who are being spoken about
did not live in Chechnya at a mature age, and if they became 'bad
guys,' then this is a question that should be put to the people who
raised them," he said.
Early Friday, a virtual army of heavily armed law
enforcement officers was still going through houses in Watertown,
outside of Boston, one by one in a search for the second suspect. The
police had blocked off a 20-block residential area and urged residents
emphatically to stay inside their homes and not answer their doors.
The Boston police commissioner, Ed Davis, said: "We
believe this to be a man who's come here to kill people, and we need to
get him in custody."
With gunfire ricocheting around the tranquil
neighborhood, residents were later told to go into their basements and
stay away from windows.
The pursuit began after 10 p.m. Thursday when two men
robbed a 7/11 near Central Square in Cambridge. A security camera caught
a man identified as one of the suspects, wearing a gray hoodie.
About 10:30, police received reports that a campus
security officer at M.I.T. was shot while he sat in his police cruiser.
He was found with multiple gunshot wounds, according to a statement
issued by the acting Middlesex district attorney, Michael Pelgro,
Cambridge Police Commissioner Robert Haas, and the M.I.T. police chief,
John DiFava. The officer was taken to Massachusetts General Hospital,
where he was pronounced dead.
A short time later, police received reports of an
armed carjacking of a Mercedes sport-utility vehicle by two males in the
area of Third Street in Cambridge, the statement said. "The victim was
carjacked at gunpoint by two males and was kept in the car with the
suspects for approximately a half-hour," the statement said. He was
later released, uninjured, at a gas station on Memorial Drive in
Cambridge.
The police immediately began to search for the vehicle
and pursued it into Watertown. During the chase, "explosive devices
were reportedly thrown from car by the suspects," the statement said,
and the suspects and police exchanged gunfire in the area of Dexter
Avenue and Laurel Street.
A Watertown resident, Andrew Kitzenberg, 29, said he
looked out his third-floor window to see two young men of slight build
in jackets engaged in "constant gunfire" with police officers. A police
S.U.V. "drove towards the shooters," he said, and was shot at until it
was severely damaged. It rolled out of control, Mr. Kitzenberg said, and
crashed into two cars in his driveway.
The two shooters, he said, had a large, unwieldy bomb that he said looked "like a pressure cooker."
"They lit it, still in the middle of the gunfire, and
threw it. But it went 20 yards at most." It exploded, he said, and
Tamerlan Tsarnaev ran toward the gathered police officers. He was
tackled, but it was not clear if he was shot, Mr. Kitzenberg said.
The explosions, said another resident, Loretta
Kehayias, 65, "lit up the whole house. I screamed. I've never seen
anything like this, never, never, never."
Meanwhile, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, said Mr. Kitzenberg, got
back into the S.U.V., turned it toward officers and "put the pedal to
the metal." The car "went right through the cops, broke right through
and continued west."
The two men left "a few backpacks right by the car,
and there is a bomb robot out there now." the police had told residents
to stay away from their windows, he said.
During this exchange, an MBTA police officer was seriously injured and taken to the hospital.
During this exchange, an MBTA police officer was seriously injured and taken to the hospital.
At the same time, Tamerlan Tsarnaev was critically
injured with multiple gunshot wounds and taken to Beth Israel Deaconess
Hospital in Boston, where he was pronounced dead at 1:35 a.m.
A doctor who works at Beth Israel, and who lived in
the area of the chase and shootout, said he was working at home around 1
a.m. when he heard the wailing sirens. He said at a news conference at
Beth Israel that he recognized that something was wrong and alerted his
emergency room to prepare for something.
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