Boston terrorist bomber ‘must die’

BOSTON: Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was a terrorist who wanted to punish America with a deadly 2013 attack, a federal prosecutor said yesterday as he urged a jury to sentence the 21-year-old to death.

Citing a note that Tsarnaev had written while hiding in a boat, bleeding, after a gunfight with police four days after the April 15, 2013, attack, Assistant US Attorney Steven Mellin said the ethnic Chechen had turned on his adopted country.

“He wrote: ‘Now I don’t like killing innocent people, but in this case it is allowed because America needs to be punished.’

“These are the words of a terrorist who is convinced he did the right thing,” Mellin said. “He killed indiscriminately to make a political statement.

“His actions have earned him a sentence of death.”

Following closing statements, the same jury that last month convicted Tsarnaev of killing three people and wounding 264 others will begin deliberations on whether to sentence him to death by lethal injection or life in prison without the possibility of release.

Mellin showed the jury photos of the bombing’s immediate aftermath, with victims whose legs were blown off sitting in pools of blood, and another image of a 29-year-old restaurant manager screaming in pain before she died of her injuries.

The defence, meanwhile, described Tsarnaev as an adrift teenager under the spell of his 26-year-old brother, Tamerlan, who they contended was the architect and driving force behind the bombing and the murder later of a police officer.

Defence attorneys noted that when Dzhokhar’s parents returned to their native Russia in 2012, he was left under the influence of Tamerlan, who had become obsessed with becoming a jihadist.

“The horrific events of the Boston Marathon bombing cannot be told or understood with any degree of reality without talking about Tamerlan,” defence attorney Judith Clarke told jurors. – Reuters