Terrorism, Boston Marathon Explosions | 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.

Russian agents placed the elder Boston bombing suspect under surveillance during a six-month visit to southern Russia last year, then scrambled to find him when he suddenly disappeared after police killed a Canadian jihadist, a security official told The Associated Press....

Two government officials tell The Associated Press that U.S. intelligence agencies added the Boston bombing suspects' mother to a federal terrorism database about 18 months before the attack....

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who is charged in the Boston Marathon explosions, was transferred to a locked medical facility for male prisoners.

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.

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.