It has been 13 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 more than 200.
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), charged him with using a weapon of mass destruction and moved him from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center to a secure facility in Fort Devens, Mass.
More details emerge adding twist to this tragic ordeal. Here are the latest updates in the ongoing case.
1. Authorities Have Found A Deleted Instagram Account Allegedly Belonging To Boston Bombing Suspect
The IG username “jmaister1” is said by sources close to Dzhokhar Tsarnaev that it supposedly belonged to him before being deleted recently.
According to CNN, a National Security Analyst for the network said of the account:
“If I were an investigator right now, obviously the platform he deleted matters the most.”
Apparently, the site also reports that there are still traces of the deleted account in Google’s Web cache and other archiving sites.
“It’s exactly like an archive,” tech entrepreneur and programmer Sam Altman explained to CNN. “So no matter what changes were made to the page today, on the current server, Google has this sort of imprint from a couple of weeks ago.”
Some of the archives say that the suspect “liked” a photo of warlord Shamil Basayev, who masterminded terrorist attacks against Russia.
Another photo he likes contained the hashtags “#FreeChechenia #Jihad #Jannah #ALLAH #Jesus and #God.”
She also said of the account:
“Were there clues embedded in the combination of images that can tell us something about what Dzhokhar was thinking?” she said. “Some of those pictures are very benign. Some of them standing alone don’t mean anything.”
2. Immigration Officials Are Holding Two Fellow Students of Boston Bombing Suspect
According to Fox News, two people seen in a photo above with the suspected bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev in New York’s famed Times Square are being held by authorities on administrative immigration violations.
The network identifies the two men as Dias Kadyrbayev and Azamat Tazhayakov, both citizens of Kazakhstan.
They can be seen standing next to Tsarnaev in a photo which is believed to have been taken in April 2012 in Times Square, which authorities also suspect was another of the bombers’ intended targets.
The site reports:
Kadyrbayev and Tazhayakov were arrested April 20 — five days after the attack at the marathon — at the Hidden Brook apartments by the FBI and Homeland Security in New Bedford Mass., and they are being detained by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement at the Suffolk County House of Corrections in Boston because of problems relating to their student visas, sources told Fox News.
3. Mother of the Boston Marathon Bombing Suspects Is A “Person of Interest” To Federal Authorities
The mother of both bombing suspects was reportedly on a federal terrorism database some 18 months before the attack.
Zubeidat Tsarnaeva, who had reportedly become more militant in her Muslim faith around the same time as her son, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, was added to the classified intelligence database known by the acronym TIDE at the CIA’s request.
According to Fox:
Two key lawmakers said authorities now want to know if she helped put her son, who died a week ago following a shootout with police in Massachusetts, on the road to radicalism.
Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger, D-Md., the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, told reporters:
“She is a person of interest that we’re looking at to see if she helped radicalize her son, or had contacts with other people or other terrorist groups,”
Tamerlan was on the same database after Russia told the CIA the mother and son were religious militants preparing to travel to Russia.
According to CNN, the mother will not be flying to the United States, where she is wanted on felony charges of shoplifting and destruction of property.
