Bombing, Tamerlan Tsarnaev | featured news

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.”