Boston police have charged three additional suspects, two Kazakhs and an American, as part of the investigation into the deadly bomb attack at the Boston Marathon on April 15th, which killed three people and injured more than 260.
Boston marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev (R) poses with Azamat Tazhayakov (L) and Dias Kadyrbayev in an undated photo taken in New York. Photo by Reuters
Boston police reported Wednesday that three more suspects in the Boston Marathon bombings have been charged.Three people were killed and more than 260 injured on April 15 when two bombs exploded near the finish line of the marathon. Tamerlan Tsarnaev, died after a gunfight with police several days after the attack. His brother Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was captured and lies in a prison hospital.
Azamat Tazhayakov and , from Kazakhstan, are charged with conspiring to obstruct justice, and face a maximum sentence of five years in prison and $250,000 fine, the Justice Department said. A third man, American Robel Phillipos, is charged with making false statements to federal investigators. He faces up to eight years in prison and a $250,000 fine, according to AFP.
The three 19-year-old college friends of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the surviving Boston Marathon bombing suspect, removed a backpack containing fireworks emptied of gunpowder from his university dormitory room three days after the attack, according to charges filed Wednesday.
The affidavit says Tazhayakov and Kadyrbayev agreed to get rid of the backpack at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth after concluding from news reports that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was one of the bombers. A court appearance for the three is scheduled for Wednesday afternoon.
“These are very serious charges,” said FRANCE 24’s Boston correspondent Phillip Crowther. “We’re looking at people who have been arrested in conjunction with what happened after the bombing.”
More information on who and why?
“The big unknown is still where the inspiration [behind the bombing] came from, whether there might have been inspiration from abroad and who might have helped before the bombings,” Crowther added. “These are the kind of people who might be able to give us a little more information.”The suspect’s brother, Tazhayakov and Kadyrbayev have been held in jail for more than a week on allegations that they violated their student visas while attending college. Linda Cristello, the Boston attorney who represented them at a hearing on the immigration case Wednesday morning, confirmed earlier that they were facing separate federal charges.
All three men charged Wednesday began attending University of Massachusetts with Tsarnaev at the same time in 2011, the FBI affidavit says.
Authorities allege that on the night of April 18, after the FBI released photos of the bombing suspects and the three men suspected their friend was one of them, they went to Tsarnaev’s dorm room. The men noticed a backpack containing fireworks, which had been opened and emptied of powder.
Covering up evidence
The FBI said that Kadyrbayev knew when he saw the empty fireworks that Tsarnaev was involved in the bombings and decided to remove the backpack from the room "in order to help his friend Tsarnaev avoid trouble." He also decided to remove Tsarnaev’s laptop, the FBI said in the affidavit.
“This means they already knew that he’s been identified as one of the suspects and then decided to get rid of some of the evidence,” said FRANCE 24’s Phillip Crowther.
After the three men returned to Kadyrbayev’s and Tazhayakov’s apartment with the backpack and computer, they watched news reports featuring photographs of Tsarnaev. The affidavit says Kadyrbayev told authorities the three men then "collectively decided to throw the backpack and fireworks into the trash because they did not want Tsarnaev to get into trouble."
Kadyrbayev said he placed the backpack and fireworks along with trash from the apartment into a large trash bag and threw it into a garbage bin near the men’s apartment.
Meanwhile, Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s relatives will claim his body now that his wife has agreed to release it, an uncle said. The body of Tsarnaev, 26, has been at the medical examiner’s office in Massachusetts since he died after a gunfight with authorities more than a week ago.
Police said Tsarnaev ran out of ammunition before his 19-year-old brother dragged his body under a vehicle while fleeing the scene. His cause of death has been determined but will not be made public until his remains are claimed.
"Of course, family members will take possession of the body," uncle Ruslan Tsarni of Maryland said Tuesday night. "We’ll do it. We will do it. A family is a family."
He would not elaborate. Tsarnaev’s parents are still in Russia, but he has other relatives on his side of the family in the US, including Tsarni.
