Friday, April 19, 2013

Boston Gripped by High-Stakes Manhunt Suspect Still at Large Is Identified as 19-Year-Old of Chechen Background; Older Brother Killed in Shootout


Boston Gripped by High-Stakes Manhunt

Suspect Still at Large Is Identified as 19-Year-Old of Chechen Background; Older Brother Killed in Shootout

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By EVAN PEREZ, JENNIFER SMITH and PERVAIZ SHALLWANI

Heavily armed FBI and police SWAT teams combed through Watertown, Mass. in a massive manhunt for Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. Video: YouTube/Scott Sassone, YouTube/David Tamang.
The Boston area remained on lockdown into the afternoon Friday as authorities conducted a manhunt for one of two brothers of Chechen background suspected in Monday's Boston Marathon bombings and a deadly showdown that began unfolding Thursday night.
Authorities identified one suspect as 26-year-old Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who was killed in a confrontation with police in Watertown, Mass., according to a U.S. law-enforcement official.

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Map: Boston Area

A manhunt was on for the second suspect, identified as Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19 years old. Both brothers were believed to be involved in the fatal shooting of a Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus police officer during Thursday night's chaotic series of events.
Police warned residents that the at-large suspect was armed and dangerous. "We believe this to be a terrorist," said Boston Police Chief Ed Davis. "We believe this to be a man who's come here to kill people. We need to get him in custody."
Authorities said the older brother was critically injured in the shootout that began Thursday night and was taken to Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, where he was pronounced dead. Richard Wolfe, the hospital's chief of emergency medicine, said the man had multiple injuries from what appeared to be both an explosive device and gunshot wounds.
Officials took the unprecedented step of asking people in metropolitan Boston to stay in their homes with the doors locked today while they looked for the suspect. The officials said part of the reason for the lockdown is that authorities are concerned the brothers may have had accomplices, and if so, any such accomplices could also try to take action.
Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick asked people throughout Boston to take shelter and stay indoors. The Federal Aviation Administration closed the low-level airspace above roughly four miles in northwest Greater Boston as the search goes on. Amtrak officials said Friday that all service from Providence, R.I., to Boston would remain suspended indefinitely.

Photos: Chaos in Boston

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Matt Rourke/Associated Press
Police officers walked near the crime scene Friday.
image
Associated Press
This photo released by the FBI shows a suspect that officials identified as Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.
The younger brother was the suspect seen wearing a white cap backward in video and photos released by the Federal Bureau of Investigation on Thursday. The release prompted a large number of tips from the public, federal officials said. The older brother was wearing a black cap in the video and photos.
The younger Mr. Tsarnaev is a student at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, university spokesman Robert Lamontagne said. The university is located in southeast Massachusetts, about an hour south of Boston.
"Out of an abundance of caution, the campus has been closed," he said in an email. "Students, staff and faculty who have not already evacuated have been told to shelter in place. No one is being allowed on campus."
The Brothers' Background
Intelligence officials said the two men came to the U.S. at different times, with the elder brother arriving on his own in 2003 or 2004. Bulletins sent out to law enforcement indicated that the younger Mr. Tsarnaev arrived in the country in 2002, said a federal law-enforcement official who reviewed the bulletin. He was born in 1993; his older brother was born in 1986, the official said.

FBI Releases Photos of Suspects

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Intelligence and counterterrorism officials have been scouring existing intelligence reporting—communications, human-source reporting, finances, travel records—to look for intersections with the two men, officials said. They are also looking at the same types of data on all relatives and friends and others connected to the two men, both overseas and in the U.S.
Intelligence and counterterrorism officials are particularly interested in the travel of the men and any associates in and out of Boston, including whether they have traveled overseas to the Northern Caucasus.
Attorney General Eric Holder and FBI Director Robert Mueller on Friday morning briefed President Barack Obama on the latest in the manhunt. An administration official said the president and Vice President Joe Biden convened a meeting in the White House Situation Room with his top national-security officials, to follow up on briefings he had received through the night.
Rep. Peter King (R., N.Y.), who sits on the House homeland security and intelligence committees, said he hopes the fugitive is captured peacefully. "I'm hoping they get the second guy alive and can interrogate him, so we can figure out, did they do it on their own or are they affiliated with a larger group?"
The Showdown Begins
Law-enforcement officials say their working theory of the events of Thursday night and Friday morning is that once the suspects' photos were distributed publicly, they decided they needed to get money and a car to leave town.
The violence began at around 10:30 p.m. Thursday with the robbery of a 7-Eleven in nearby Cambridge, authorities said.
The two men then allegedly fatally shot an MIT campus police officer and carjacked a Mercedes sport-utility vehicle at gunpoint, keeping the vehicle's owner hostage for about a half-hour, police said. The brothers told their carjacking victim they were responsible for the marathon bombings, the officials said, before letting him go at a gas station in Cambridge. The carjacking victim wasn't injured.
Soon after that, police began chasing the stolen car, and the suspects tried to throw some kind of explosive devices out of the car to escape law enforcement, officials said. "There was an exchange of gunfire" between police and the suspects," State Police Col. Timothy Alben said.
Hundreds of police officers descended on the Cambridge and Watertown areas as the violence unfolded Thursday night, authorities said. Residents said they heard loud explosions and gunfire.
Katie Blouin, 24 years old, of Watertown, said FBI agents and local police entered her house, searching before telling her boyfriend to lock the house's doors.
"I'm shaking," she said. "It just makes you so nervous."

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Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center geared up for a potential mass-casualty event when one doctor there—who lives near the scene of the gunfight—heard the commotion outside his home.
"When I started hearing the gunshots and explosions, given what had happened over at MIT and seeing all the police cars rushing into Watertown and past my house and hearing all the sirens, I knew or felt very strongly that this was related to the events from earlier this week as well as from what happened over at MIT," said David Schoenfeld, an emergency physician there, during a news conference early Friday.
"Because of that, I felt as though something large enough was going on in the community that it warranted calling the emergency department and coming in," he said.
MIT identified the police officer killed Thursday as Sean A. Collier, 26, of Somerville, Mass. The officer had multiple gunshot wounds and was taken to a nearby hospital, where he was pronounced dead, according to a statement on the Middlesex County District Attorney's website.
Officer Collier appears to have been ambushed, having had no previous contact with the suspect, said a spokeswoman for the district attorney's office.
Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority officer Richard Donahue, 33, was struck by a bullet and remains in critical condition, the spokeswoman said.
Family Interviewed
FBI agents in Maryland interviewed two of the suspects' uncles in Maryland, U.S. law-enforcement officials said. The relatives are cooperating and the activity isn't related to any potential threat, the officials said.
Ruslan Tsarni, an uncle of the two suspects, told reporters outside his Maryland home Friday that he was ashamed of what they allegedly did.
He said he didn't believe that the suspects had an ideological motive but called them "losers—not being able to settle themselves [in America] and thereby just hating everyone who did."
He added: "This has nothing to do with Chechnya.''
The uncle urged his fugitive nephew to turn himself in and ask for "forgiveness from the victims, from the injured.…He put a shame on our family, he put a shame on the entire Chechen ethnicity because everyone now plays with the word Chechen so he put that shame on the entire ethnicity."
Law-enforcement officers descended on Mr. Tsarni's home Friday morning, and he was questioned by investigators for several hours. The home is on a quiet cul-de-sac in Montgomery Village, a suburb of Washington, D.C.
A second uncle also lives in the area.
—Devlin Barrett, Josh Dawsey, Jon Kamp and Jack Nicas contributed to this article.
Write to Evan Perez at evan.perez@wsj.com and Jennifer Smith atjennifer.smith@wsj.com
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