Tamerlan Anzorovich Tsarnaev ( ; October 21, 1986 – April 19, 2013) ; ; ; was a terrorist of Chechen and Avar descent. He and his younger brother, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, committed the Boston Marathon bombing on April 15, 2013.
Tamerlan Tsarnaev entered the United States in the early 2000s and later became a lawful permanent resident. He attended Bunker Hill Community College and pursued a boxing career. At some point in time, he became an adherent of Islamic extremism. In 2011, Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) warned the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) about Tsarnaev's extremism and his alleged connection to underground groups in the Russian region. Later in 2011, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) added Tsarnaev to its Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment database.
According to Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, he and Tamerlan Tsarnaev used pressure cooker bombs to commit the Boston Marathon bombing. One bomb was placed at the Boston Marathon finish line, while the other was placed outside the Forum restaurant. The bombs were detonated at 2:49 pm on April 15, 2013. The bombing killed three people and injured hundreds of others.
On April 18, 2013, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) released images of Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev in connection with its investigation of the Boston Marathon bombing. Shortly thereafter, the Tsarnaev brothers killed an MIT policeman, carjacked an SUV, and engaged in a shootout with police in the Boston suburb of Watertown. After being shot and tackled by police, Tamerlan Tsarnaev was struck and dragged beneath the stolen SUV driven by his brother, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. Dzhokhar, later admitted as a co-conspirator in the Boston Marathon bombing, was incarcerated and sentenced to death.
Childhood and family background The Tsarnaev family was forcibly moved from Chechnya to the Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan in the years following World War II. Husband Anzor Tsarnaev is Chechen, and wife Zubeidat Tsarnaeva is an Avar. The Tsarnaevs had two daughters and two sons. Tamerlan Tsarnaev was born in the Kalmyk Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic on October 21, 1986, and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was born on July 22, 1993. The Tsarnaev family raised their children as Muslims.
As children, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev lived in Tokmok, Kyrgyzstan. In 2001, the Tsarnaev family moved to Makhachkala, Dagestan, in the Russian Federation. In April 2002, the Tsarnaev parents and Dzhokhar visited the United States on a 90-day tourist visa. Anzor Tsarnaev applied for asylum, citing fears of deadly persecution due to his ties to Chechnya. Tamerlan Tsarnaev was left in the care of his uncle Ruslan in Kyrgyzstan, and arrived in the U.S. approximately two years later. The United States granted asylum to the Tsarnaev parents, and their four children later received "derivative asylum status". The family settled on Norfolk Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In March 2007, the Tsarnaevs were granted legal permanent residence. Tamerlan Tsarnaev was a permanent resident of the U.S. and a citizen of both Russia and Kyrgyzstan.
Activities prior to Boston Marathon bombing 2003–2007 According to Tsarnaev's immigration file, he received his visa at the U.S. consulate in Ankara, Turkey and was admitted to the United States in 2003. After arriving in the U.S., he attended Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, a public high school. He applied for admission at the University of Massachusetts Boston for the fall of 2006, but was rejected. He attended Bunker Hill Community College part-time for three terms between 2006 and 2008, studying accounting with hopes of becoming an engineer. He dropped out of school to concentrate on boxing.
2008 In 2008, Tsarnaev's mother urged him to embrace Islam because she was concerned about his drinking, smoking, and pursuit of women. She said he began to read more about it on the Internet. Tsarnaev sometimes attended the Islamic Society of Boston mosque near his home in Cambridge. Although the Americans for Peace and Tolerance, a longtime critic of the mosque, alleges that the mosque supports "a brand of Islamic thought that encourages grievances against the West, distrust of law enforcement and opposition to Western forms of government, dress and social values", the mosque has condemned terrorism and would later ask Tsarnaev to stop attending because he interrupted the Friday sermon.
2009 Tsarnaev was arrested at his home at 410 Norfolk Street in Cambridge, on July 28, 2009, for aggravated domestic assault and battery upon his then-girlfriend. The case was dismissed for lack of prosecution.
Tsarnaev dated Katherine Russell of North Kingstown, Rhode Island on and off while she attended Suffolk University from 2007 to 2010.
The Tsarnaev brothers' uncle, Ruslan Tsarni, said he "had been concerned about his nephew being an extremist since 2009". Tsarni said that Tsarnaev's radicalization started not during his visit to Russia in January 2012, but much earlier in Boston after he was influenced by a Muslim convert known as "Misha". "Misha" was later identified as Mikhail Allakhverdov, a 39-year-old from Rhode Island (of Armenian-Ukrainian origin, born in Azerbaijan). Allakhverdov told The New York Review of Books that he rejected violence, was not Tsarnaev's teacher, had not spoken to Tamerlan in three years and had never met his family members. Furthermore, he said that he had cooperated with a brief FBI investigation that the NYRB reported had found no ties between Allakhverdov and the attacks.
2010 According to a 2010 photo essay in The Comment, the student magazine of Boston University College of Communication, Tsarnaev said that he was working to become a naturalized citizen in time to be selected for the U.S. Olympic boxing team. He added that he would "rather compete for the United States than for Russia", while remarking that he "didn't understand" Americans and did not have any American friends. A later FBI report recorded Tamerlan stating that was a misquote, and that most of his friends were American. He added that he abstained from drinking and smoking, because "God says no to alcohol" and that "there are no values anymore. People can't control themselves". Rule changes disqualified all non-US citizens from Golden Gloves boxing, ending Tsarnaev's boxing career and Olympic hopes.
In the spring of 2010, Katherine Russell became pregnant with Tsarnaev's child. Russell dropped out of college at the end of her junior year and married Tsarnaev on June 21, 2010, in a 15-minute ceremony in an office at the Masjid Al Quran in the Dorchester area of Greater Boston.Multiple sources: The couple's daughter was born in October 2010.
Tsarnaev first came to the attention of Russian security forces in December 2010 when William Plotnikov was briefly detained in Dagestan and forced to disclose his social networking contacts in North America with ties to Russia.
2011 In early 2011, Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) told the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) that Tsarnaev was a follower of Islamic extremism. The FSB said that he was preparing to leave the United States to travel to the Russian region to join unspecified underground groups. The FBI initially denied that it had contacted Tsarnaev, but then confirmed that it had after Tsarnaev's mother talked about the FBI's contacts with her son on RT. The FBI said that it interviewed him and relatives of his, but did not find any terrorist activity. At that point, the FBI asked the FSB for more information, but the Russians did not respond to the American request and the FBI closed the case.
Tsarnaev's mother said that FBI agents had told her they feared her son was an "extremist leader", and that he was getting information from "extremist sites". She said Tsarnaev had been under FBI surveillance for at least three years and that "they were controlling every step of him". The FBI denied this accusation. Tsarnaev "vaguely discussed" jihad during a 2011 phone call with his mother that was taped by the FSB, and intelligence officials also discovered text messages in which his mother discussed how he was ready to die for Islam. In late 2011, the Central Intelligence Agency put both Tsarnaev and his mother on its Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment database.
Alleged involvement in Waltham triple murder
Two Jewish men, Erik Weissman and Raphael Teken, as well as their roommate Brendan Mess, were killed in a triple homicide in Waltham, Massachusetts on September 11, 2011. It was reported on April 23, 2013 that local authorities believed Tsarnaev may have been responsible for the triple homicide, and that they and the FBI were investigating the possibility.Multiple sources: A search warrant affidavit that was partially unsealed in November 2019 provided further details about Tsarnaev's alleged connection to the crime.
2012 Visit to Russia Tsarnaev traveled to Russia through Moscow's Domodedovo International Airport in January 2012, and returned to the U.S. in July 2012.
Tsarnaev arrived in Dagestan around March 2012, and his father arrived there in May. U.S. House Homeland Security Chairman Michael McCaul said he believed that Tsarnaev received training during his trip and became radicalized. In an early report, Dagestan's interior minister Abdurashid Magomedov said through a spokesman that Tsarnaev "did not have contact with the [Islamist] underground during his visit".
Tsarnaev's maternal third cousin, Magomed Kartashov, is a figure in Dagestan's Islamist community.Article about the book, Maximum Harm, The Intelligencer, Summer 2017, page 110 Zubeidat Tsarnaeva confirmed that they "became very close." Kartashov's Islamist organization, "The Union of the Just," advocates Islam as a political system under sharia law. Kartashov later stated the Boston bombing was "good" in that it would increase converts to Islam similarly to the attacks of September 11.
According to media reports, Tsarnaev was seen by Dagestan police, who were conducting surveillance, making six visits to a known Islamic militant in a Salafi mosque in Makhachkala founded by an associate of Ayman Zawahiri.Multiple sources: According to Russian investigative newspaper Novaya Gazeta, quoting unnamed Russian security sources, Tsarnaev was linked to 23-year-old William Plotnikov, an ethnic Russian-Tatar Islamic militant and Canadian citizen, with whom he communicated via online social networking sites. Tsarnaev had also visited Toronto, where Plotnikov lived with his parents. Once in Dagestan, Tsarnaev is said to have met on several occasions with Makhmud Mansur Nidal, a 19-year-old Dagestani-Palestinian man. Nidal was under close surveillance by Dagestan's anti-extremism unit for six months as a suspected recruiter for Islamist insurgents before the police killed him. According to Novaya Gazeta, Tsarnaev had sought to join the local insurgency and was put on a months-long period of 'quarantine' (a clearance check by insurgents looking for infiltrating double agents). After Tsarnaev's alleged contacts were both killed, he "got frightened and fled". In an apparent hurry that Russian authorities considered suspicious, he left Russia in July two days after Plotnikov was killed and did not wait to pick up his new Russian passport (which was ostensibly one of his main reasons for coming to Russia in the first place).
In an interview, Tsarnaev's father later said he had to force his son to return to the United States to complete his U.S. citizenship application after Tsarnaev tried to convince his family to allow him to stay in Dagestan for good.
Return to U.S.