Terrorist, Boston Marathon Explosions | featured news

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.

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.

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.”

As churches paused to mourn the dead and console the survivors of the Boston Marathon bombing Sunday, the city's police commissioner said the two suspects had such a large cache of weapons that they were probably planning other attacks. The surviving suspect remained hospitalized and unable to speak with a gunshot wound to the throat.

The FBI has flatly rejected an assertion by the mother of the two suspected Boston bombers that the bureau had been tracking her oldest son and had spoken with him last week after the deadly marathon bombing.