Secrets of the Boston Assassins

A mysterious friend, a mother and the Internet are the reasons for the radical change in two Chechen brothers who planted bombs on the finishing line of the Boston Marathon last week. The younger one, seriously injured 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who tried to commit suicide while being surrounded by the police on Friday, testified from his hospital bed. He claimed that it was his older brother, 26-year-old Tamerlan, killed in the shooting with the police last week, who conceived of the attack in which three people were killed and more than 200 were injured. No professional terrorists participated.

Dzhokhar’s version seems plausible; evidence of Tamerlan’s gradual change comes from multiple sources. He and his entire family lived near Boston for years. As recently as four years ago he was rarely seen in a mosque, living a carefree life full of parties, girls and drugs. He changed course due to the influence of his mother, who — by her own admission in an interview for The Wall Street Journal — advised him to study Islam, and the mysterious Misha, an Armenian immigrant with whom he was meeting. Misha’s identity has yet to be established, or at least the media has not yet published it.

The assassins’ uncle, Ruslan Tsarni — who has been living in the U.S. for years — claims that Tamerlan was completely brainwashed by radical Misha. He gave up his life full of entertainment and even amateur boxing, which is allegedly at odds with Islam, and made his father in particular unhappy. He became a fervent opponent of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and he started to believe in a conspiracy theory that said that the Sept. 11, 2001 attack was organized by Americans themselves as an excuse to invade Islamic lands. He began visiting the websites of extremists who called to jihad — understood as a holy war against non-believers. He was probably ultimately radicalized in 2012, when he went to Russian Dagestan near the border with Chechnya for half a year.

For a change, Dzhokhar remained carefree, or so it would appear from the tracks he left on the Internet, Twitter and Facebook. His quite recent entries, like “Miss USA is very sexy,” and comments about pop stars, etc. are typical of a teenager. He was deeply rooted in American popular culture to the end; it is likely that, as his uncle Ruslan claims, his older brother used his authority to drag him into the conspiracy. Family friends told CNN that Dzhokhar followed his older brother around like a dog.

Two questions remain unanswered: Why did the brothers shoot an MIT security guard on Thursday night — which is how they were unmasked — and why didn’t the FBI keep a close watch on Tamerlan, despite receiving information from the Russian services, in 2011, that he might be engaged in illegal activity? There was an anti-Russian conspiracy in Chechnya, but the FBI checked Tamerlan and informed the Russians that it didn’t find anything suspicious.

A delegation of American investigators went to Russian Dagestan, where the assassins’ father and mother have recently moved, after years of living in the U.S. They want to interrogate the parents and expect Russian authorities to help. The parents — they are divorced — both claim that their sons were framed for the attack and that they are victims of a Secret Service conspiracy. A similar version is becoming more and more popular in the Internet; the Facebook page “Tamerlan Was & Dzhokhar Tsarnaev Is Innocent” was recently created and already has 12,000 friends.