DEVELOPING: The brothers behind Monday’s deadly bombing at the Boston Marathon are believed to have come to the U.S. from Chechnya as long as a decade ago, but apparently never fit in with the American culture.
“I don’t have a single American friend, I don’t understand them,” the older brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who was killed in a shootout with police hours after the pair was identified as suspects, told a photographer in 2009.
What drove him and his brother, Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev, 19, who lived with him in Cambridge, Mass., to perpetrate the deadly attack — which killed three people and injured 176 others — is not clear. They are believed to be Muslim and to have had military training overseas. But the older brother, who was 26, also worked out in a gym and dreamed of making the U.S. Olympic boxing team, according to an online photojournalism slideshow that chronicled his training.
The journalist who created the project, Johannes Hirn, could not be reached for comment. But one caption in his account described the family’s odyssey to America.
“Tamerlan fled Chechnya with his family because of the conflict in the early 90s, and lived there for years in Kazakhstan before getting to the United States as a refugee,” read the caption.
Tamerlan previously studied at Bunker Hill Community College in hopes of becoming an engineer. He took off a semester from his studies to practice boxing at the Wai Kru Mixed Martial Arts Center in Boston.
His brother is believed to be the same Dzhokhar Tsarnaev who won a $2,500 scholarship in 2011 from the city of Cambridge, according to online records.
The father of the suspects, reached in Makhachkala, Russia, by The Associated Press, characterized his younger son as an intelligent and accomplished young man.
“My son is a true angel,” Anzor Tsarnaev said. “Dzhokhar is a second-year medical student in the U.S. He is such an intelligent boy. We expected him to come on holidays here.”
An uncle of the brothers, also reached by The Associated Press, said that the men lived together near Boston and have been in the United States for about a decade. They traveled here together from the Russian region near Chechnya, according to Ruslan Tsarni of Montgomery Village, Md.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Via: Fox News
