Orlando death amid Boston bombing inquiry draws lawsuit

The parents of Ibragim Todashev filed a new wrongful death lawsuit in Orlando against the U.S. government, two FBI agents and two Massachusetts state troopers over the 2013 death of their son in his Orlando apartment.

Todashev, 27, a Chechen national, was shot seven times by law enforcement officers a month after the Boston Marathon bombing. Two FBI agents and two state troopers, all from Massachusetts, had gone to his home to question him about the bombing and a 2011 triple homicide in Boston. According to the suit, evidence from the shooting and the autopsy doesn’t match the official account.

Officers had accused Todashev of attacking them with a pipe, just after he agreed to sign a statement implicating himself and bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev. According to the lawsuit: “After Todashev was dead, the agents tried to arrange the apartment to make it look like [he] had picked up a metal tube to use as a weapon but failed to get Todashev’s fingerprints on the tube.”

State Attorney Jeff Ashton’s independent review found the FBI agent was justified in shooting the mixed-martial artist in his home on Peregrine Avenue in southeast Orlando, near the intersection of Vineland and Kirkman roads.

The family put the government on notice two years ago that it intended to file a wrongful-death suit. Todashev’s father, Abdulbaki Todasheve, and mother Zulla Todasheva, are represented by the Florida chapter of Council on American-Islamic Relations and its attorney, Thania Clevenger. “We’d given the government ample time to respond,” she said.

Todashev was already highly suspicious of authorities when they arrived because he’d already been cuffed and detained by them, “unlawfully,” on a previous occasion, according to the suit. It says police also had cuffed and detained his girlfriend, Tatyana Gruzdeva, on a previous occasion. When he agreed to meet agents at his home the night of his death, Todashev had asked his friend Khusen Tamarov to be there. According to the suit, officers told Tamarov to leave about an hour before the shooting.