Boston Marathon, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev | featured news

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

The surviving suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings has been charged with using a weapon of mass destruction, the US Department of Justice says. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who was charged in hospital, could face the death penalty. A White House spokesman has said Mr Tsarnaev will not be treated as an "enemy combatant", as suggested by some Republican members of Congress.

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.”

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.

Twitter lit up Friday morning with dramatic reports from confused and terrified residents of suburban Boston, where a massive manhunt was under way for a suspect in Monday's Boston Marathon bombings.

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.

With the second suspect in the Boston Marathon bombing still at large early Friday morning, Gov. Deval Patrick ordered everyone in the city to stay home. "There is a massive manhunt underway," he said at a morning press conference, calling it a "rapidly developing situation." Police Col. Timothy P. Alben added, "It may take hours."

The FBI released photos and video Thursday of two suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing and asked for the public's help in identifying them, zeroing in on the two men on surveillance-camera footage less than three days after the deadly attack.