By JAY LINDSAY and EILEEN SULLIVAN | Associated Press
Lifting days of anxiety for a city and a nation on edge, police captured the surviving Boston Marathon bombing suspect,
found bloodied in a backyard boat Friday night less than 24 hours after
a wild car chase and gun battle that left his older brother dead and Boston and its suburbs sealed in an extraordinary dragnet.
"We got him," Boston Mayor Tom Menino tweeted. A cheer erupted from a crowd gathered near the scene.
"CAPTURED!!!" police added later. "The hunt is over. The search is
done. The terror is over. And justice has won. Suspect in custody."
During a long night of violence Thursday and into Friday, brothers Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev killed an MIT police officer, severely wounded another lawman and hurled explosives at police in a desperate getaway attempt, authorities said.
Late Friday, less than an hour after authorities said the search for
Dzhokhar had proved fruitless, they tracked down the 19-year-old college
student holed up in the boat, weakened by a gunshot wound after fleeing
on foot from the overnight shootout with police that left 200 spent
rounds behind.
He was hospitalized in serious condition, unable to be questioned about his motives.
Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, died in the shootout early in the day. At one
point, he was run over by his younger brother in a car as he lay
wounded, according to investigators.
The violent endgame unfolded four days after the bombing and just a
day after the FBI released surveillance-camera images of two young men
suspected of planting the pressure-cooker explosives that ripped through
the crowd at the marathon finish line, killing three people and
wounding more than 180.
The two men were identified by authorities and relatives as ethnic
Chechens from southern Russia who had been in the U.S. for about a
decade and were believed to be living in Cambridge, just outside Boston.
But investigators gave no details on the motive for the attack.
President Barack Obama said the nation owes a debt of gratitude to law enforcement
officials and the people of Boston for their help in the search. But he
said there are many unanswered questions about the Boston bombings,
including whether the two men had help from others. He urged people not
to rush judgment about their motivations.
The breakthrough came when a man in a Watertown neighborhood saw
blood on a boat parked in a yard and pulled back the tarp to see a man
covered in blood, authorities said. The resident called 911 and when
police arrived, they tried to talk the suspect into getting out of the
boat, said Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis.
"He was not communicative," Davis said.
Instead, he said, there was an exchange of gunfire — the final volley of one of the biggest manhunts in American history.
Watertown residents who had been told in the morning to stay inside
behind locked doors poured out of their homes and lined the streets to
cheer police vehicles as they rolled away from the scene.
Celebratory bells rang from a church tower. Teenagers waved American
flags. Drivers honked. Every time an emergency vehicle went by, people
cheered loudly.
"They finally caught the jerk," said nurse Cindy Boyle. "It was scary. It was tense."
Police said three other people were taken into custody for
questioning at an off-campus housing complex at the University of the
Massachusetts at Dartmouth where the younger man may have lived.
"Tonight, our family applauds the entire law enforcement community
for a job well done, and trust that our justice system will now do its
job," said the family of 8-year-old Martin Richard, who died in the
bombing.
The FBI was swamped with tips — 300,000 per minute — after the
release of the surveillance-camera photos, but what role those played in
the overnight clash was unclear. State Police spokesman Dave Procopio
said police realized they were dealing with the bombing suspects based
on what the two men told a carjacking victim during their night of
crime.
The search by thousands of law enforcement officers all but paralyzed
the Boston area for much of the day. Officials shut down all mass
transit, including Amtrak trains to New York, advised businesses not to
open, and warned close to 1 million people in the entire city and some
of its suburbs to unlock their doors only for uniformed police.
Around midday, the suspects' uncle, Ruslan Tsarni of Montgomery
Village, Md., pleaded on television: "Dzhokhar, if you are alive, turn
yourself in and ask for forgiveness."
Until the younger man's capture, it was looking like a grim day for
police. As night fell, they announced that they were scaling back the
hunt and lifting the stay-indoors order across Boston and some of its
suburbs because they had come up empty-handed.
But then the break came and within a couple of hours, the four-day ordeal was over. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was captured about a mile from the site of the shootout that killed his brother.
Chechnya has been the scene of two wars between Russian forces and
separatists since 1994, in which tens of thousands were killed in heavy
Russian bombing. That spawned an Islamic insurgency that has carried out
deadly bombings in Russia and the region, although not in the West.
The older brother had strong political views about the United States,
said Albrecht Ammon, 18, a downstairs-apartment neighbor in Cambridge.
Ammon quoted Tsarnaev as saying that the U.S. uses the Bible as "an
excuse for invading other countries."
Also, the FBI interviewed the older brother at the request of a
foreign government in 2011, and nothing derogatory was found, according
to a federal law enforcement official who was not authorized to discuss
the case publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.
The official did not identify the foreign country or say why it made the request.
Authorities said the man dubbed Suspect No. 1 — the one in sunglasses
and a dark baseball cap in the surveillance-camera pictures — was
Tamerlan Tsarnaev, while Suspect No. 2, the one in a white baseball cap
worn backward, was his younger brother.
Exactly how the long night of crime began was unclear. But police
said the brothers carjacked a man in a Mercedes-Benz in Cambridge, just
across the Charles River from Boston, then released him unharmed at a
gas station.
They also shot to death a Massachusetts Institute of Technology
police officer, 26-year-old Sean Collier, while he was responding to a
report of a disturbance, investigators said.
The search for the Mercedes led to a chase that ended in Watertown, where authorities
said the suspects threw explosive devices from the car and exchanged
gunfire with police. A transit police officer, 33-year-old Richard
Donohue, was shot and critically wounded, authorities said.
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev somehow slipped away. He ran over his already
wounded brother as he fled, according to two law enforcement officials
who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to
discuss the investigation. At some point, he abandoned his car and ran
away.
Tamerlan Tsarnaev died at a Boston hospital after suffering what
doctors said were multiple gunshot wounds and a possible blast injury.
The brothers had built an arsenal
of pipe bombs, grenades and improvised explosive devices and used some
of the weapons in trying to make their getaway, said Rep. Dutch
Ruppersberger, D-Md., a member of the House Intelligence Committee.
No comments:
Post a Comment