April 27, 2013

Boston Bomber Tsarnaev moved to US military prison hospital


 
Younger brother Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev, 19 years old. Seriously injured in a shootout with police. First taken to Boston Hospital - he was then moved to the prison hospital at Fort Devens, Massachusetts around April 26, 2013.
 
Fort Devens is a reservist United States military installation in the towns of Ayer and Shirley, Massachusetts. Within Fort Devens Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev is being held at the Federal Medical Center, a federal prison for male inmates requiring specialized or long-term physical or mental health care.



Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26 years old. Shot dead by Boston Police.


It might be unkind to say that between the world's largest, most highly funded, security agencies, Russia's Federal Security Bureau (FSB) and the FBI, the Tsarnaev brothers slipped through the cracks from 2011.
 
This might show how hard identifying and taken proactive measures is - or that big organisations (with too many distractions) might be more likely to make mistakes.

Of the two agencies FSB was probably most on the ball. It could be that the FSB provided the strongest tip-off of the brother's identities to the FBI - once the first photos of the brothers were released.

After the bombing the FBI moved very quickly to utilise the public communications revolution that is Twitter and mobile phone cameras to identify likely bombers. Commercial and police? CCTV footage would have also helped.

Two days after the bombings the inability (or unwillingness?) of the two brothers to hide and their shootouts with police spoke louder than any confessions would have that they were the bombers.
 
On why did they (Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev) do it?

The Tsarnaev brothers (with their family) escaped the fighting in the Russian republic of Chechnya to the central Asian country of Kyrgyzstan and then on to the United States in the early 2000s.

Most likely the brothers felt guilty that they were unable to fight or practice jihad (roughly translated as holy war) against the Russians in the ongoing insurgency in their place of birth, the Northern Caucasus which includes Chechnya, and the Russian republic of Dagestan . Both republics are mainly Sunni Muslim. The Russians have and are cracking down on Chechen "terrorists" much more severely than the FBI could in America (where human rights are a high priority).

Tamerlan, during his 6 month (January-July 2012) return to the Northern Caucasus, may have been aware that Russian security were on to him or that he decided to return to the US because life was too hard and risky there compared to congenial Boston.
 
The two brothers may well have wanted to do something for their vision of Islam against the main WoT "enemy of Islam" (the US) and other Western enemies in the most newsworthy way easily available. The Boston Marathon provided the opportunity - full of US and other Western runners making it temporarily an  international event. So this was jihad in place - highly symbolic but also a practical way to kill and injure many "enemies".

 

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