USA, marathon bombs
Other people targeted by the FBI

NEW YORK – The FBI investigations on the Boston marathon attack are widening: in the viewfinder there would be other “people of interest” in the United States, in addition to the Chechen brothers Tsarnaev. And in the meantime, with the passing of the days new embarrassing details emerge: according to rumors, the Russian authorities had alerted the American government about Tamerlan Tsarnaev, in 2011, following the interception of two phone calls in which the boy spoke of jihad, but the alarm did not have a concrete following in Washington.

One of the calls was with her mother. The other was between the mother and a second person, already under the FBI lens but for reasons not related to the attack in Boston. In none of the two phone calls, however, was any reference to an attack.

The Russian alert, first launched in March 2011, was followed by FBI talks with Tamerlan Tsarnaev but no evidence of any crime had been found nor was it considered by the feds to go further. A few months later, in September 2011, Moscow had sent back the same information about the boy: on the American side the request for further investigation had started at that point in order to understand what was behind the alert, but the Russian authorities had not provided any other explanations.

In the last hours rumors have been leaked, however, about intercepted phone calls and their contents. While the father of the two Tsarnaev brothers, as his mother already, lets the Russian Caucasus know that he has “postponed”, at least for the moment, his journey he had previously announced he wanted to do in the United States to make himself available to investigators: “I’m sick, I’ll go when I’m cured”, he simply told Reuters. “I don’t even know if I could see my son Dzhokhar,” he added, pointing out that he was “in contact with him and with the lawyers, who would tell me” what to do.

The revelations about Tamerlan and his mother’s telephone references to the ‘holy war’ (jihad) come while Mike Rohgers, chairman of the House services committee, warns: “There are other people of interest in the United States with whom the FBI would like to talk “.

Meanwhile, details continue to emerge about the life of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the older of the two brothers, mortally wounded after the Boston bombing, and about his experience as a boxer banned from the ring after winning two consecutive Golden Globe tournament titles because he did not still an American citizen. The change in the rules had led to the removal of other boxing boys, excluded from the tournament after it was decided that non-Americans could no longer participate.

Tamerlan later attributed the farewell to boxing gloves to the alleged incompatibility of boxing sport with devotion to Islam. But according to reports from the New York Times, citing his friends, devotion had been a phenomenon that had actually developed after leaving the sport.

(April 28, 2013)