Boys suspected in Boston bombings victims of setup, mother says

The mother of the two suspects in the Boston Marathon bombings has unveiled that her sons have fallen victim to a ‘setup’ and that her elder son had been under FBI surveillance for about five years.

One of the suspects, 26-year-old Tamerlan Tsarnaev, died in a hospital in Boston on Friday after sustaining critical injuries in a car-chase and shootout with the police.

His 19-year-old brother Dzhokar was arrested during a manhunt operation in the city of Watertown on April 19.

“He (Tamerlan) was ‘controlled’ by the FBI, like, for three to five years,” their mother, Zubeidat Tsarnaev, told the English-language Russia Today television station via phone from Makhachkala, where she lives in Russia’s Dagestan region after returning from the United States.

“They knew what my son was doing. They knew what sites on the Internet he was going to.”

Tsarnaev noted that FBI officers had told her that Tamerlan “was really an extremist leader and that they were afraid of him.”

“They told me whatever information he is getting, he gets from these extremists’ sites” she said, adding that the police were monitoring her son “at every step… and now they say that this is a terrorist act! Never ever is this true, my sons are innocent!”

“It is really, really a hard thing to hear. And being a mother, what I can say is that I am really sure, I am, like, 100 percent sure, that this is a setup,” Zubeidat stated.

“My two sons are really innocent and I know that neither of them never, never, have talked about whatever they’re saying about now.”

“Save your life and tell the truth, that you haven’t done anything, that this is a set up!” she addressed her younger son.

The FBI also confirmed that its officers had interviewed Tamerlan in 2011 at the request of a foreign government, without unveiling the name of the state. It added the authorities “did not find any terrorism activity, domestic or foreign” during the interview.

Mrs. Tsarnaev added that she and her husband had been disappointed and returned to Russia due to increasing surveillance activities of the US police and their atrocity toward foreigners following 9/11.

The boys’ father, Anzor, also made the same comment on Friday, saying that the two had been framed.

“I do not believe that my sons could have planned and organized the terrorist act, because they knew US national security services were keeping an eye on them,” Anzor Tsarnaev told Russia’s Channel One television.

“They (the security services) said ‘We know what you eat, what you read on the Internet’.”

The boys were the main suspects in two bombings in Boston on April 15 that left three people dead and more than 170 injured.

The two brothers are also accused of killing a police officer on campus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on April 18.

Police say the two men were armed with explosives and guns when they battled law enforcement officers in the Boston suburb of Watertown early on April 19. Authorities say the suspects hurled explosives from a stolen car as they fled a swarm of police officers who exchanged gunfire.