Tamerlan Tsarnaev | featured news

The widow of dead Boston Marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev has hired a criminal lawyer with experience defending terrorism cases as she continues to face questions from federal authorities.

The mother of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects insisted Thursday that her sons are not responsible for the attack and said she did not see any aggression in the older brother, even when the FBI questioned him two years ago.

The F.B.I. and the C.I.A. separately had Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the suspect who died last week, listed in government databases in 2011, though they cleared him of extremist links.

The portrait investigators have begun to piece together of the two brothers suspected of the Boston Marathon bombings suggests that they were motivated by extremist Islamic beliefs but were not acting with known terrorist groups — and that they may have learned to build bombs simply by logging onto the online English-language magazine of the affiliate of Al Qaeda in Yemen, law enforcement officials said Tuesday.

In the years before the Boston Marathon bombings, Tamerlan Tsarnaev fell under the influence of a new friend, a Muslim convert who steered the religiously apathetic young man toward a strict strain of Islam, family members said.

The wife of deceased Boston Marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev is "very distraught" and "cries a lot," her lawyer told CNN on Monday. The FBI wants to interview Katherine Russell about her husband, but for now, agents only have been able to talk to attorney Amato DeLuca. "She knew nothing about it at any time," DeLuca told CNN's Chris Lawrence, referring to the bomb plot.

A man who says he was abducted by the Boston Marathon bombing suspects during a carjacking told police the suspects said they would not kill him because he “wasn’t American.” The man, who has asked that his identity not be revealed, told NBC News that he managed to escape Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s clutches, describing them as “brutal and cautious.”

An uncle of the Boston bombing suspects emphatically explains why he feels the two committed the attacks.

One was a boxer who liked Russian rap videos and once said, “I don’t have a single American friend.” The other, an all-star high school wrestler, listed “Islam” as his worldview on a Russian social media page and was described by a neighbor as a “very photogenic kid” who had “a heart of gold.”

In an anguished interview, the father of the suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing described his fugitive son as a smart and accomplished "angel." Anzor Tsarnaev spoke with The Associated Press by telephone from the southern Russian republic of Dagestan after police said one of his sons, 26-year-old Tamerlan, had been killed in a shootout and the other, Dzhokhar, was being intensely pursued.