Boston bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev said on his Russian social media page that his world view was “Islam,” while his older brother Tamerlan Tsarnaev talked about being “very religious” and complained there “are no values anymore,” according to an English-language Russian newspaper.
The Moscow Times story posted online gave new details about the two brothers believed to have carried out the deadly attack at the finish line of the Boston Marathon Monday. Tamerlan Tsarnaev was killed in a clash with police Thursday night, while his brother is the subject of a massive manhunt Friday morning.
According to the Moscow Times account, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev belonged to two Chechnya-related groups on the Vkontakte social media network, a Russian-language version of Facebook. He last logged on to the site at 5:04 a.m. Moscow time, which would be 9:04 p.m. Thursday night in Boston.
“Djohar Tsarnaev says on his Vkontakte page that his world view is ’Islam’ and his personal priority is ’career and money,’” according to the Moscow newspaper.
According to the Kyrgyz news agency 24.kg, law enforcement officials in the Central Asian nation of Kyrgyzstan say they two brothers emigrated from the country to Dagestan, a Russian province close to Chechnya, around 2001 and later moved to the United States. There have been reports that the Tsarnaev family fled to either Kyrgystan or Kazakhstan in the early 1990s because of the chaos caused by the brutal Chechen war for independence from Moscow following the breakup of the Soviet Union.
The Moscow Times reported that a Dagestan school, Gymnasium No. 1, confirmed that school records indicate the two brothers and their two sisters studied there after arriving from Kyrgyzstan in 2001 but only studied for a year before leaving for the United States.
Russian Foreign Ministry officials have said they are aware of the Boston suspects’ Russian background and are looking into their records.
Chechnya leader Ramzan Kadyrov, a onetime Chechen rebel leader who now is allied with Russian President Vladimir Putin, rejected the idea that his republic’s unrest and terrorist violence are to blame for the Boston Marathon attacks.
“These people did not live in Chechnya at a mature age, and if they turned into bad guys, then this is the problem of those who raised them,” Kadyrov spokesman Alvi Karimov told the Russian Interfax news service.
• David R. Sands can be reached at dsands@washingtontimes.com.
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