Tamerlan Tsarnaev

Tamerlan Anzorovich Tsarnaev (; October 21, 1986 – April 19, 2013)russian: link=no, Тамерла́н Анзо́рович Царна́ев ; ce, Царнаев Анзор-кIант Тамерлан ; ky, Тамерлан Анзор уулу Царнаев, translit=Tamerlan Anzor uulu Tsarnaev; av, Тамерлан Анзоразул вас Царнаев was an American-based Russian terrorist and former boxer of Chechen and Avar descent who, with his brother Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, planted pressure cooker bombs at the Boston Marathon on April 15, 2013. The bombings killed three people and reportedly injured as many as 264 others. He emigrated to the United States in 2004 at the age of 18. At the time of the bombings, Tsarnaev was an aspiring boxer.

Shortly after the Federal Bureau of Investigation declared them suspects in the bombings and released images of them, the Tsarnaev brothers killed an MIT policeman, carjacked an SUV, and engaged in a shootout with the police in the Boston suburb of Watertown. According to the federal indictment, during the shootout, Tamerlan was captured but died, partly as a result of his brother driving over him, and an MBTA police officer was critically injured in the course of Dzhokhar's escape in the SUV, the latter by what may have been friendly fire. An injured Dzhokhar escaped, but was found, arrested, and hospitalized on the evening of April 19 after an unprecedented manhunt in which thousands of police officials searched a 20-block area of Watertown.

During his incarceration, Tsarnaev's brother allegedly said during questioning that the pair next intended to detonate explosives in Times Square in New York City. Dzhokhar reportedly told authorities that he and his brother were radicalized, at least in part, by watching lectures by Anwar al-Awlaki.

Personal background

Family background

The Tsarnaev family was forcibly moved from Chechnya to the Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan in the years following World War II. Anzor Tsarnaev is a Chechen, and Zubeidat Tsarnaeva is an Avar. The couple had two sons, with Tamerlan Tsarnaev born in the Kalmyk Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic on October 21, 1986, and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev born in Kyrgyzstan on July 22, 1993. The parents also have two daughters. According to some, other Chechen Americans in the area apparently did not consider the American branch of the family to be fully Chechen because they had not ever lived in Chechnya.

As children, Tsarnaev and his brother lived in Tokmok, Kyrgyzstan. In 2001, the family moved to Makhachkala, Dagestan, in the Russian Federation. In April 2002, the Tsarnaev parents and Dzhokhar went to the United States on a 90-day tourist visa. Anzor Tsarnaev applied for asylum, citing fears of deadly persecution due to his ties to Chechnya.

Tsarnaev was left in the care of his uncle Ruslan in Kyrgyzstan, and arrived in the U.S. around two years later. In the U.S. the parents received asylum and then filed for their four children, who received "derivative asylum status". They settled on Norfolk Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Tsarnaev lived in Cambridge on 410 Norfolk Street until his death.

The family "was in constant transition" for the next decade. Anzor and Zubeidat Tsarnaev both received welfare benefits. The father worked as a backyard mechanic and the mother worked as a cosmetologist until she lost her job for refusing to work in a business that served men. In March 2007, the family was granted legal permanent residence.

Early life

Tamerlan Tsarnaev was born in the Kalmyk Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (now Kalmykia), a North Caucasus unit of the Soviet Union, the RSFSR. He was a permanent resident of the U.S., a Russian citizen, and a Kyrgyzstani citizen.

Activities prior to the bombings

2003–2007

According to his immigration file, Tsarnaev was admitted to the U.S. in 2003, receiving his visa at the U.S. consulate in Ankara, Turkey. After arriving in the U.S., he attended Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, a public high school. He applied for admission at the University of Massachusetts Boston for the fall of 2006, but was rejected. He attended Bunker Hill Community College part-time for three terms between 2006 and 2008, studying accounting with hopes of becoming an engineer. He dropped out of school to concentrate on boxing.

In 2007, Tsarnaev confronted a Brazilian youth who had dated his younger sister, Bella, for about two years, and punched him in the face. A high school friend of Bella said Tsarnaev did not approve because the boy was not a Muslim.

2008

During 2008, Tsarnaev became a devout Muslim and stopped drinking and smoking (eventually becoming an extremist a year later). He began to regularly attend the Islamic Society of Boston mosque near his home in Cambridge. Although the Americans for Peace and Tolerance, a longtime critic of the mosque, alleges to support "a brand of Islamic thought that encourages grievances against the West, distrust of law enforcement and opposition to Western forms of government, dress and social values," the mosque has condemned terrorism and would even later ask Tsarnaev to stop attending due to him interrupting the Friday sermon.

In May 2008, his sister said her husband was cheating on her and beating her up. Tsarnaev flew across the country to Bellingham, Washington, to "straighten up the brains" of his brother-in-law, Khozhugov.

2009

An aspiring heavyweight boxer, Tsarnaev trained at the Wai Kru Mixed Martial Arts Center, a Boston club. In 2009–10, he was the New England Golden Gloves heavyweight champion, winning the Rocky Marciano Trophy. In May 2009, he fought in the nationals in the 201-pound weight class, but lost a first-round decision.

Tsarnaev first dated Nadine Ascencao who became his live-in girlfriend. After an incident between Ascencao and Tsarnaev, she called 911 crying hysterically and asking for help. Tsarnaev was arrested at his home at 410 Norfolk Street in Cambridge, on July 28, 2009, for aggravated domestic assault and battery. The case was dismissed for lack of prosecution, but Tsarnaev's father attributed to it the delay in his eldest son gaining U.S. citizenship.

Tsarnaev then began dating an American, Katherine Russell, from North Kingstown, Rhode Island, on and off while she attended Suffolk University from 2007 to 2010. She converted to Islam and started wearing a hijab in 2008. Friends said he would shout at her that she was a "slut". They described fights in which he would "fly into rages and sometimes throw furniture or throw things".Older Suspect Described As Controlling, Manipulative
, National Public Radio, April 19, 2013.

The Tsarnaev brothers' uncle, Ruslan Tsarni, said he "had been concerned about his nephew being an extremist since 2009". Tsarni said that Tsarnaev's radicalization started not during his visit to Russia in January 2012, but much earlier in Boston after he was influenced by a Muslim convert known as "Misha". "Misha" was later identified as Mikhail Allakhverdov, a 39-year-old from Rhode Island (of Armenian- Ukrainian origin, born in Azerbaijan). Allakhverdov told ''The New York Review of Books'' that he rejected violence, was not Tsarnaev's teacher, had not spoken to Tamerlan in three years and had never met his family members. Furthermore, he said that he had cooperated with a brief FBI investigation that the ''NYRB'' reported had found no ties between Allakhverdov and the attacks.

2010

According to a 2010 photo essay about him in ''The Comment'', the graduate student magazine of Boston University College of Communication, Tsarnaev said that he was working to become a naturalized citizen in time to be selected for the U.S. Olympic boxing team. He added that he would "rather compete for the United States than for Russia", while remarking that he "didn't understand" Americans and did not have any American friends. A later FBI report recorded Tamerlan stating that was a misquote, and that most of his friends were American. He added that he abstained from drinking and smoking, because "God says no to alcohol" and that "there are no values anymore. People can't control themselves".

Pro-super middleweight Edwin Rodriguez sparred with Tsarnaev in 2010, and later said that, although Tsarnaev hit hard, he lacked competitiveness and immediately complained of stomach pain and rib pain. He described Tsarnaev as arrogant but "a coward". Tsarnaev's landlord said the boxer's aspirations were never met because "his back was in really bad shape and he couldn't get into the Olympics".
His coach and another boxer described him as talented but cool and arrogant. Rule changes disqualified all non-US citizens from Golden Gloves boxing, ending Tsarnaev's boxing career and Olympic hopes.

According to an aunt in Dagestan, "He started to be really interested in Islam about three years ago pril 2010 but he was never a radical."

In the spring of 2010, his girlfriend Katherine Russell became pregnant with their child and dropped out of college at the end of her junior year to marry Tsarnaev on June 21, 2010, in a 15-minute ceremony in an office at the Masjid Al Quran in the Dorchester area of Greater Boston. Imam Taalib Mahdee said that he had not met the couple before the ceremony, and Katherine was the one who had called and asked to be married there. Katherine Russell had converted to Islam after starting dating Tsarnaev and had adopted the Muslim name Karima. The couple had a daughter, Zahara Tsarnaev, born in October 2010.

Tsarnaev first came to the attention of Russian security forces in December 2010 when William Plotnikov was briefly detained in Dagestan and forced to disclose his social networking contacts in North America with ties to Russia.

2011

In early 2011, Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) told the Federal Bureau of Investigation that Tsarnaev was a follower of Islamic extremism and a strong believer. The FSB said that he was preparing to leave the United States to travel to the Russian region to join unspecified underground groups. The FBI initially denied that it had contacted Tsarnaev, but then said that it actually had after Tsarnaev's mother talked about the FBI's contacts with her son on RT. The FBI said that it interviewed him and relatives of his, but did not find any terrorist activity, and that it provided the results in the summer of 2011. At that point, the FBI asked the FSB for more information, but the Russians did not respond to the American request, and the FBI officially closed the case.

Tsarnaev's mother said that FBI agents had told her they feared her son was an "extremist leader", and that he was getting information from "extremist sites". She said Tsarnaev had been under FBI surveillance for at least three years and that "they were controlling every step of him". The FBI flatly denied this accusation. Tsarnaev "vaguely discussed" ''jihad'' during a 2011 phone call with his mother that was taped by the FSB, and intelligence officials also discovered text messages in which his mother discussed how he was ready to die for Islam. In late 2011, the Central Intelligence Agency put both Tsarnaev and his mother on its Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment database.

Involvement in Waltham triple murder

Two Jewish men, Erik Weissman and Raphael Teken, as well as their roommate Brendan Mess, were killed in a triple homicide in Waltham, Massachusetts, on September 11, 2011, the 10-year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Each victim's throat had been slit with such great force as to be nearly decapitated. Thousands of dollars worth of marijuana and cash were left covering the victims' bodies, and $5,000 was left at the scene. The local district attorney said that it appeared that the killer and the victims knew each other. It was reported on April 23, 2013, that local authorities believed Tsarnaev may have been responsible for the triple homicide, and they and the FBI were investigating the possibility. In May, forensic evidence connected the two brothers to the scene of the killings, and their cell phone records appeared to place them in the area. The officials cautioned that until more definitive DNA testing is complete, it is still too early to consider bringing an indictment against the younger of the two brothers.

ABC reported on April 23, 2013, that authorities linked Tsarnaev to the Waltham unsolved triple homicide. A search warrant affidavit partially unsealed in November 2019 provided further details to Tsarnaev's link to the triple homicide.

Visit to Russia and return to the United States

Visit to Russia

Tsarnaev traveled to Russia through Moscow's Domodedovo International Airport in January 2012, and returned to the U.S. in July 2012. He and his wife received public assistance and food stamps from September 2011 to November 2012, which included all the time Tsarnaev was in Russia. Zubeidat Tsarnaeva said her son had wanted his wife and their child to move to Dagestan with him, and that: "She herself agreed; she said she wanted to study a different culture, language."

During the six months he was overseas, he visited his family in the North Caucasus.

Tsarnaev's father said that he was with him in Makhachkala, the capital of Dagestan, for six months and that they had done ordinary things, such as visiting relatives. His father also said that they visited Chechnya twice, to see relatives there and to receive his son's new Russian passport. While Tsarnaev arrived in Russia in January 2012, however, he only arrived in Dagestan around March, and his father arrived there in May. U.S. House Homeland Security Chairman Michael McCaul said he believed that Tsarnaev received training during his trip, and became radicalized. In an early report, Dagestan's interior minister Abdurashid Magomedov said through a spokesman that Tsarnaev "did not have contact with the slamistunderground during his visit".

The Tsarnaev brothers' mother's second cousin, Magomed Kartashov, is a figure in Dagestan's Islamist community. Zubeidat confirmed that they "became very close." Kartashov's Islamist organization, "The Union of the Just," advocates Islam as a political system under sharia law. Kartashov later stated the Boston bombing was "good" in that it would increase converts to Islam, similar to the attacks of September 11.

According to media reports, Tsarnaev was seen by Dagestan police, who were conducting surveillance, making six visits to a known Islamic militant in a Salafi mosque in Makhachkala founded by an associate of Ayman Zawahiri. According to Russian investigative newspaper '' Novaya Gazeta'', quoting unnamed Russian security sources, Tsarnaev was linked to 23-year-old William Plotnikov, an ethnic Russian-Tatar

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