Nephews framed: uncle
GROZNY (Russia): A member of the suspected Boston Marathon bombers’ extended family said they were victims of a Russian plot to portray them as Chechen terrorists operating on US soil.
Said Tsarnaev, who lives in Grozny, the capital of Russia’s volatile Chechnya region, accused Moscow yesterday of sending false information to the US to frame the suspects, ethnic Chechen brothers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.
He said Moscow wanted to convince the West that an Islamist insurgency being waged across Russia’s North Caucasus had gone global, resulting in an attack on an American target.
“It would not have happened without the involvement of the Russian side,” Tsarnaev, 56, said from his home in Grozny.
“Russia needed to show the West, including the US, that Chechens are terrorists... They needed to blacken their reputation and present these two people and the Chechen people as a whole as terrorists. This is why it all happened.”
Said Tsarnaev, a local photojournalist who has worked for various publications including Reuters, echoed views expressed by others in their closeknit family who have denied that the brothers, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, car- ried out the bombings.
He said he had never met Tamerlan and denied rumours that he had once travelled to Chechnya. He added that the brothers were devout Muslims but that did not make them extremists.
“They are my relatives and they are part of my people. This is not just my pain, it is the pain of the entire (Chechen) people... We can only feel sympathy. No one is accusing them of anything here.” – Reuters