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Boston bombing suspect had U.S. citizenship application halted in recent months

JOHN SCHWARTZ and JULIA PRESTON

BOSTON and NEW YORK — The New York Times News Service

Published Saturday, Apr. 20 2013

Tamerlan, 26, died early Friday after a shootout with police in Watertown, Mass. Officials said that at the time of his death, his application for citizenship was still under review and was being investigated by federal law-enforcement officials.

It had been previously reported that Tamerlan’s application might have been held up because of a domestic-abuse episode. But the officials said that it was the record of the FBI interview that threw up red flags and halted, at least temporarily, the citizenship application. Federal law-enforcement officials reported Friday that the FBI had interviewed Tamerlan in January, 2011, at the request of the Russian government, which suspected that he had ties to Chechen terrorists.

The officials pointed to the decision to hold up that application as evidence that Tamerlan’s earlier encounter with the FBI had not fallen through the cracks in the vast criminal and national security databases that the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI review as a standard requirement for citizenship. The application, which was presented on Sept. 5, 2012, also prompted “additional investigation” of him this year by federal law enforcement agencies, according to the officials. They declined to say how far that examination had progressed or what it covered.

The investigation into the Boston Marathon bombings turned Saturday to questions about the men’s motives and to the significance of a six-month trip Tamerlan took to Russia and Chechnya in 2012. Law enforcement officials are now conducting a review of that trip, to see if Tamerlan might have met with extremists or received training from them while abroad, current and former intelligence and law enforcement officials said.

“It’s a key thread for investigators and the intelligence community to pull on,” Kevin R. Brock, a former senior FBI and counterterrorism official, said.

Tamerlan had submitted his citizenship application only six days after his brother and suspected accomplice in the bombings, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, had his own citizenship application approved.

Federal prosecutors were drafting a criminal complaint Saturday against Dzhokhar, who was wounded in the leg and neck and had lost a great deal of blood at the time he was captured Friday evening.

A spokeswoman for Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, Kelly Lawman, confirmed on Saturday that Dzhokhar was being treated there, but declined to comment on his condition. The FBI would be providing any updates, she said. U.S. officials said a special interrogation team for high-value suspects would question him, but he was still unable to speak.

Late last year Homeland Security officials contacted the FBI to learn more about its interview with Tamerlan, federal law-enforcement officials said. The FBI reported its conclusion that he did not present a threat. At that point, Homeland Security officials did not move to approve the application nor did they deny it, but they left it open for “additional review.”

Tamerlan’s record also showed that he had been involved in an episode of domestic violence in 2009. His father, Anzor, said in an interview Friday in Makhachkala, in the Russian republic of Dagestan, where he lives, that Tamerlan had a spat with a girlfriend and he “hit her lightly.”

Under immigration law, certain domestic-violence offenses can disqualify an immigrant from becoming a U.S. citizen, and perhaps expose him to deportation. But the Homeland Security review found that while Tamerlan was arrested, he was not convicted in the incident. The law requires a serious criminal conviction in a domestic-violence case for officials to initiate a deportation, federal officials said.

Both Tsarnaev brothers came to the United States and remained here legally under an asylum petition in 2002 by their father, who claimed he feared for his life because of his activities in Chechnya. Both sons applied for citizenship after they had been living here as legal permanent residents for at least five years, as the law requires.

The FBI and local law enforcement agencies continued to gather evidence and investigate Monday’s twin bombings, the slaying of an MIT police officer Thursday night and the subsequent battle with the police that left another officer critically wounded.

The official said that the criminal complaint against Dzhokhar will likely include a constellation of charges stemming from both the bombing and the shooting, possibly including the use of weapons of mass destruction, an applicable charge for the detonation of a bomb. That charge, the official said, carries a maximum penalty of death. While Massachusetts has outlawed the death penalty, federal law allows it.

Questions also arose concerning the arrest and prosecution Dzhokhar, and whether he should be given a Miranda warning and other elements of constitutional rights in criminal cases. Investigators did invoke what the Justice Department has called a public-safety exception to delay the discussion of the Miranda rule with Dzhokhar.

Miranda rules require investigators to warn a suspect in custody of the right to remain silent and to have a lawyer present. If prosecutors want to use statements at a trial that a defendant made in custody, the police must first have advised him of his rights, the Supreme Court ruled in 1966 to protect against involuntary self-incrimination. The court later created an exception, allowing prosecutors to use statements made before any warning in response to questions about immediate threats to public safety, such as where a gun is hidden.

The question of applying those rules in terrorism cases arose after a Nigerian named Umar Farouk Abdulmuttalab tried to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner on Dec. 25, 2009. After landing in Michigan, he was given painkillers for burns and confessed to a nurse. He also spoke freely to FBI agents for 50 minutes before going into surgery.

After he awoke, the FBI read Abdulmuttalab the Miranda warning, and he stopped co-operating for several weeks.

Further attention surrounds the government’s early scrutiny of Tamerlan and whether possible warning signs may have been missed.

As federal officials now step up their investigation, an important element will be the trip Tamerlan made to Russia and Chechnya in 2012. In early 2011, the FBI said in a statement, “a foreign government” – now acknowledged by officials to be Russia – asked for information about Tamerlan, “based on information that he was a follower of radical Islam and a strong believer, and that he had changed drastically since 2010 as he prepared to leave the United States for travel to the country’s region to join unspecified underground groups.” A senior law enforcement official said they feared he could be a risk, and “they had something on him and were concerned about him, and him travelling to their region.”

The bureau responded to the request by checking “U.S. government databases and other information to look for such things as derogatory telephone communications, possible use of online sites associated with the promotion of radical activity, associations with other persons of interest, travel history and plans, and education history,” the statement explained. The bureau also interviewed Tamerlan and family members. According to the statement, “the FBI did not find any terrorism activity, domestic or foreign,” and conveyed those findings to “the foreign government” by the summer of 2011. As the law enforcement official put in, “We didn’t find anything on him that was derogatory.”

Tamerlan did travel to Russia early last year and returned six months later, on July 17, a law enforcement official said. He spent most of the time with his father in Makhachkala, the capital of the Dagestan region, the men’s father, Anzor Tsarnaev, told a Russian interviewer, but “we went to Chechnya to visit relatives,” he said.

Members of the Tsarnaev family in Makhachkala recalled those interviews vividly. In an interview in Russia, Zubeidat Tsarnaeva, the mother of the two men, said that the FBI had questioned her older son closely. She recalled that they told her he was “an excellent boy.” But “at the same time they told me he is getting information from really, extremist sites, and they are afraid of him.”

The state news agency RIA Novosti quoted Anzor Tsarnaev about the FBI’s close questioning, “two or three times,” of Tamerlan. Anzor, who lives in a five-storey, yellow brick building in a working-class neighborhood of the city, recalled that the agents told his son, “We know what you read, what you drink, what you eat, where you go.” He said that they told Tamerlan that the questioning “is prophylactic, so that no one set off bombs on the streets of Boston, so that our children could peacefully go to school.”

Those comments, he said, disturbed him. “This conversation took place a year and a half ago. But there is a question, why would they talk about it then?”

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/wor … e11436598/

Statistics: Posted by yoda — Sun Apr 21, 2013 12:41 am