MAKHACHKALA, April 25 (RIA Novosti) – The FBI has promised to allow the surviving suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings to see his parents, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s mother said on Thursday.
“The FBI has promised to organize a meeting with our son when we arrive in Boston,” the suspect’s mother Zubeidat Tsarnaeva told journalists, speaking from Makhachkala, the capital of Russia’s republic of Dagestan. She added that she did not know yet when she would go to Boston.
The older Tsarnaev brother, Tamerlan, 26, died in a shootout with police on Friday. A few hours later his younger brother Dzhokhar, 19, was captured after a manhunt that shut down much of Boston and its surrounding areas. He remains in a Boston hospital where he is being treated for injuries to his head, neck, legs and hand.
Dzhokhar has been charged with using a weapon of mass destruction, which could carry the death penalty.
Tsarnaeva also said FBI officers had asked her about Tamerlan’s personal life, his friends and reading habits.
The father of the two suspects, Anzor Tsarnaev, said earlier in the day that his wife had no plans yet to return to the United States, where the family previously lived, but that he would fly there today.
Tsarnaeva said earlier on Thursday she was considering giving up her US citizenship over the incident.
She has repeatedly stated that her sons were innocent and that they were framed.
A police source had previously told RIA Novosti that the suspects’ parents had agreed to visit the United States to assist in the ongoing investigation, after a team from the US Embassy in Moscow spoke with them in Dagestan this week.
Tsarnaeva could be arrested over previous shoplifting charges if she returns to the United States, said a clerk at the district court in Natick, Massachusetts, during a phone conversation on Wednesday with RIA Novosti. Tsarnaeva dismissed the theft charges against her as “nonsense” on Thursday.
The Tsarnaev brothers are suspected of having planted the homemade bombs that exploded at the Boston Marathon finish line on April 15, killing three people and injuring more than 200.
