Aunt ‘suspicious’ that brothers’ involvement was ‘staged’
Toronto woman says nephews are ‘angels’
The last time Maret Tsarnaev spoke to her nephew Tamarlan, in February, he was on the phone from the family hometown of Makhachkala, in the Russian republic of Dagestan, on the western shore of the Caspian Sea.
She joked that he must be meeting pretty girls, but Tamarlan laughed it off, saying he is a family man, married to a woman from a “good Christian family,” with whom he has a daughter about to turn three.
She said it was his first trip there since 2003, and he was staying with his mother’s relatives, “figuring out what to do next,” having dropped out of university and stopped boxing.
Tamarlan, 26, the favoured oldest son, was killed in a dramatic clash with police in Boston early Friday. Dzhokhar, 19, the youngest child and a student of marine biology and a wrestler at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, was arrested by police late Friday.
In sharp contrast to her younger brother Ruslan in Maryland, who spoke publicly of the shame his nephews’ alleged actions have brought upon his family and fellow Chechens, Tsarnaev was defiant, saying this is a frameup by “government agencies,” and that she would not believe it until she saw actual proof.
She has not seen her nephews in person in five years.
“I’m suspicious it was staged ... I do not lightly trust any officials,” she told reporters in the lobby of her apartment building on the Lake Ontario waterfront west of downtown Toronto. “If somebody wants to convince me, show me evidence.”
As to who would frame them, Tsarnaev said “whoever needs this,” and seemed to suggest American authorities.
“I know (Tamarlan and Dzhokhar) as angels,” she said, in the lengthy press scrum. She did say, however, that the family knew Tamarlan was arrested in 2009 for, as she put it, “slapping” his wife, and the family took him to task for this and said it must stop.
Tsarnaev, who has a young son, is studying for a graduate law degree, and was a practising lawyer back in Dagestan, so she is trained to be suspicious, she said.
She said Tamarlan had started praying a few years ago, but denied they had any interest in or experience with Islamist extremism. No one in the family was killed in the Chechen conflict, she said, and the boys did not frequently return.
She said her heritage has made her skeptical of all authorities. “I’m a Chechen. I have to prove myself twice,” she said.
Tamarlan and Dzhokhar’s parents, Zubeida and Anzur (Tsarnaev’s brother, who worked in “enforcement agencies”) fled Chechnya amid the violence of the First Chechen War in 1994.
She was adamant she did not yet believe her nephews committed the bombings.
“What could be the reason to go out and kill innocent people? You have to have a motive. You have to fight for some idea. As far as I know them, they don’t have any ideas to say we hate,” she said.