Courtney Brillant helps her two-year-old son Wesley to place a flower at a memorial for the victims of the Boston Marathon bombings, near the finish line in Boston, Massachusetts, yesterday.
BOSTON, Massachusetts: With the hospitalised Boston bombing suspect unable to speak, attention shifted yesterday to his dead brother, who may have been radicalised or even trained in the Caucasus last year.
US lawmakers questioned why Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, killed in a shootout, did not raise more red flags despite being questioned at the request of a foreign government in 2011 and spending six months in the volatile region in 2012.
“Clearly something happened in my judgement in that six-month timeframe... I’m very concerned,” Representative Michael McCaul, Chairman of the House Homeland Security committee, told CNN’s State of the Union.
“I personally believe that this man received training when he was over there and he radicalised from 2010 to the present.”
Republican Senator Lindsey Graham and Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer, appearing on the same show, also expressed concern about the older Tsarnaev.
“It’s people like this that you don’t want to let out of your sight, and this was a mistake,” Graham said about the elder of the two brothers, ethnic Chechens who had been living in the United States for a decade.
“I don’t know if our laws are insufficient or the FBI failed, but we’re at war with radical Islamists and we need to up our game.”
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, meanwhile remained in a heavily guarded hospital, reportedly unable to speak because of a throat wound suffered in the violent chase that shut down Boston for most of the day Friday.
The FBI would only say yesterday that he was still in “serious condition.”
The Tsarnaev brothers are the main suspects in the double bomb attack on the Boston marathon which killed three people and wounded about 180. A policeman was killed and another was seriously wounded in a shootout with the suspects.
Counter-terrorism agents trained in interrogating “high-value” detainees were waiting to question Dzhokhar — who is being treated at the same hospital as many of the marathon bombing victims — a law enforcement official said.
Officials have reportedly invoked a “public safety” legal exception that will allow them to question Tsarnaev without reading him his rights.
Graham and fellow Republican Senator John McCain have led calls for the teenager to be declared an “enemy combatant,” which would give him the same status as Guantanamo “war on terror” detainees. Legal rights groups have meanwhile insisted he be given a criminal trial, even though Tsarnaev would likely face the death penalty.
Dzhokhar became a US citizen in 2011, while his older brother’s application was reportedly held up.
AFP
