WASHINGTON, April 22 (RIA Novosti) – The American widow of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the suspected Boston Marathon bomber who was killed in a shoot-out with police last week, had no inkling he was allegedly involved in the attack, in which three people were killed and more than 180 injured, until she saw his picture on television, the Associated Press (AP) reported Monday.
Speaking for the first time since the bombings, Katherine Russell Tsarnaev said through her lawyer that she learned from television reports that her 26-year-old husband, the older of the two bombing suspect brothers, was being sought by police for his alleged role in the attacks, attorney Amato DeLuca told the AP.
Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s 19-year-old brother Dzhokhar survived the shootout but was taken into custody Friday after a massive manhunt that lasted nearly 24 hours and saw the city of Boston and its nearby suburbs shut down as officials ordered residents to stay indoors.
According to the AP, the FBI visited Russell, 24, on Sunday at her parents’ home in Rhode Island, but she refused to meet with them.
The FBI on Monday refused to comment to RIA Novosti “at this stage” on any details of the investigation, including whether or not they have tried to speak to Russell.
US media reports said the young woman and her 3-year-old daughter Zahara had gone to Rhode Island on Saturday from the apartment she shared in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with Tamerlan Tsarnaev.
CNN reported Monday that Russell “understands why federal investigators want to talk to her, but she wants to go through lawyers at the moment. The wife says this has been very hard for her.”
DeLuca said Russell last saw Tamerlan Tsarnaev on Thursday morning, before leaving for work as a home health aide. She works seven days a week to support the family, while Tsarnaev looked after Zahara, he said.
“There was no reason for her to have suspected him” of any involvement in the attacks on the Boston Marathon, DeLuca said.
The FBI released pictures and video of two men suspected in the deadly bombings on Thursday evening. A few hours later, the Tsarnaev brothers are suspected of killing a Massachusetts Institute of Technology police officer and carjacking a vehicle in the Boston area, allegedly telling the driver that they were the marathon bombers. The older Tsarnaev died in a shootout with police in the Boston suburb of Watertown in the early hours of Friday.
DeLuca said Russell met Tamerlan Tsarnaev when she was a student at Suffolk University in Boston and dropped out of the university when she married him in 2009 or 2010.
She was raised Christian, but after meeting him, she converted to Islam, DeLuca said. When asked why she converted, he said: “She believes in the tenets of Islam and of the Koran. She believes in God.”
