Charges to be issued to Boston bombing surviving suspect

PanARMENIAN.Net - Investigators were seeking a motive for the Boston Marathon bombings and whether others were involved as they awaited a chance on Sunday, April 21 to interview the surviving ethnic Chechen suspect, Reuters reported.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, was in a Boston hospital seriously wounded and unable to speak, after he was captured late on Friday at the end of a huge manhunt that shut down Boston.

His brother, Tamerlan, 26, was killed in a firefight with police earlier on Friday.

Investigators are trying to establish whether others may have had a role in the detonation of bombs made in pressure cookers and packed with ball bearings and nails that exploded at the Boston Marathon on Monday, killing three people and injuring 176.

Tamerlan traveled to Moscow in January 2012 and spent six months in the region, a law enforcement source said. But it was unclear what he did while he was there and if he could have had contact with militant Islamist groups in southern Russia's restive Caucasus region.

Authorities have yet to charge Dzhokhar, who will be defended by the Federal Public Defender Office that represents criminal suspects who cannot afford a lawyer.

Sources had suggested he would face charges on Saturday but late in the evening officials from the U.S. Attorneys' Office and the Department of Justice indicated no statements would be issued before Sunday.

The role of the FBI is also being questioned after the agency said it had interviewed Tamerlan in 2011 after Russian security services raised concerns he followed radical Islam. The FBI said it did not find any "terrorism activity" at that time.

But the suspect's mother, Zubeidat Tsarnaeva, who now lives in Russia, told a Russian television station that Tamerlan had been under FBI surveillance for years.

The New York Times, citing unnamed federal officials, reported authorities had held up Tamerlan's application for U.S. citizenship because of the FBI's 2011 interview.

Records show that Tamerlan was arrested when police were called to a report of domestic violence in 2009.

The FBI believes the older brother was the leader of the pair, although investigators were checking on people who had contact with both brothers to see if anyone else was involved, a senior U.S. law enforcement source said.

Dzhokhar, a student at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, was shot in the throat and could not speak because of injuries to his tongue, said a source close to the investigation. It was unclear when he would be able to talk.