Terrorism, Bombing | featured news

Boylston Street opened to pedestrian and vehicular traffic on Wednesday, nine days after two bombs exploded at the finish line of the Boston Marathon.

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.

Thousands gathered on the MIT campus here Wednesday for an emotional memorial service honoring slain school police officer Sean Collier.

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.

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.”

Federal investigators want to speak with multiple persons seen in at least one video from the Boston Marathon, according to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, backing up what FBI sources had told Fox News earlier.

Investigators poring over photos and video from the Boston Marathon have an image of a potential suspect in the deadly bombing but do not know his name and have not questioned him, a law enforcement official said Wednesday.

The two bombs that ripped through the crowds at the Boston Marathon, killing three people and wounding more than 170, were fashioned out of pressure cookers and packed with shards of metal, nails and ball bearings, a person briefed on the investigation said Tuesday.

It seems as if violence is everywhere, but it's really on the run. Yes, thousands of people have died in bloody unrest from Africa to Pakistan, while terrorists plot bombings and kidnappings. Wars drag on in Iraq and Afghanistan. In peaceful Norway, a man massacred 69 youths in July. In Mexico, headless bodies turn up, victims of drug cartels. This month eight people died in a shooting in a California hair salon.

The toll in the Belarus subway bombing rose to 12 dead and more than 200 wounded Tuesday and authorities said several people have been detained in what they are calling a terrorist attack....