It’s been ten days since Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev allegedly detonated two pressure cooker bombs at the Boston Marathon; an act of terror that killed three and injured 232.
Since last Monday, authorities have shut down and reopened the city of Boston, engaged in a shootout with the Tsarnaev brothers, captured the youngest of the two (who was hiding in a boat), and charged him with using a weapon of mass destruction.
Other details that will most certainly help in the case against Dzhokar, also known as Jahar, have come to light as well.
Here’s the latest updates you need to know…
1. Another one of the Tsarnaevs’ Aunts speaks, reveals a Boston Mosque has refused to bury Tamerlan Tsarnaev:
NBC reports: Patimat Suleimanova said U.S. authorities had told the family they could have the 26-year-old’s body. Tsarnaev was killed during a shootout with police on Friday.
Suleimanova said one of the suspects’ uncles approached the imam of a Boston mosque attended by the brothers to request a burial and funeral service, but was declined.
She did not know the name of the mosque but said it was one the family attended.
Members of The Islamic Society of Boston mosque in Cambridge, Mass., which the brothers attended, have been questioned by FBI agents, Yusufi Vali, a spokesman for the mosque said Tuesday.
Asked on Tuesday whether his mosque would conduct the burial, he told reporters:
“That’s a decision that we’d leave up to a scholar. This one is complex because the things that this guy did were just absolutely disgraceful.”
Earlier this week, Imam Talal Eid of the Islamic Institute of Boston, told The Huffington Post:
“I would not be willing to do a funeral for him. This is a person who deliberately killed people. There is no room for him as a Muslim.”
2. The Jihadist magazine, Inspire, that taught the bombers to kill has been exposed:
Gawker reports:
Wired‘s Spencer Ackerman called Inspire “a lifestyle rag for the conspiracy-minded takfiri, filling the inexplicably vacant media space between O: The Oprah Magazine, Popular Mechanics and the al-Qaeda book Knights Under The Prophet’s Banner.” But he also warned of Inspire‘s potential to, well, inspire violence:
[T]he apparent purpose of launching Inspire [is] getting frustrated Muslim youth to buy into al-Qaida’s holistic conspiracy theory that the crises of the modern era are attributable to a nefarious American-Jewish alliance against True Islam, and then giving them the tools to murder people.
The U.S. government was very explicit about its insistence that Inspire was dangerous, assassinating its editor and publisher, Samir Khan—an American citizen—in a 2011 drone strike in Yemen that also killed imam Anwar al-Awlaki.
Today, news broke that the sole surviving Boston Marathon bombing suspect, Dzokhar Tsarnaev, has admitted to investigators that he and his brother Tamerlan learned to make pressure cooker bombs by reading Inspire, which ran a detailed feature about explosive-building in its debut issue under the headline “Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom.” Penned by someone calling himself The AQ Chef, the article’s intro reads, in part: “If you are sincere in your intentions to serve the religion of Allah, then all what you have to do is enter your kitchen and make an explosive device that would damage the enemy if you put your trust in Allah and then use this explosive device properly.”
3. Dzokhar Tsarnaev has an online following of supporters
ABC reports:
Boston has rallied around its police and victims of the marathon bombing, but there are thousands of people who are rallying around Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the man accused of carrying out the atrocity.
“We truly believe he has been set up and that there is not enough evidence to incriminate him,” said the Facebook group “Dzhokhar Tsarnaev Is Innocent,” which has more than 12,000 members.
On Twitter, the hashtag #FreeJahar, the nickname Tsarnaev goes by, has gained traction. A Change.org petition addressed to President Obama has garnered more than 6,000 signatures, saying Tsarnaev and his older brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, who died in a gun battle with police, are “wrongfully accused of something they did not do.”
4. The owner of “the boat,” Slip Away II, speaks
CNN affiliate WCVB reports:
David Henneberry, the owner of the Slip Away II, the boat Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was hiding in when cops found him, told CNN affiliate WCVB he was just tinkering with the vessel when he found the accused terrorist on the lam.
“I [was] just going to put the pads back — they were bugging me all day,” he said. “So I went out in the yard and felt the freedom that everyone in Watertown was feeling. When I pulled the strap, it was a lot looser than it usually is. But again, the wind could have loosened things up.”
Henneberry said — contrary to police reports — there was no evidence of blood on the boat’s protective tarp.
There was “no indication of anything,” he said. “I know people say I saw blood on the boat, ‘He saw blood on the boat’ — not true.”
He said once he went inside the boat, he did see plenty of blood, and Tsarnaev “was just lying there by the engine block and the floor.
“I couldn’t see his face — I’m glad I didn’t see his face — he didn’t move,” recalled Henneberry, who called himself an “incidental hero” for alerting authorities to the much-sought-after capture.
Story developing…
