WASHINGTON, April 26 (RIA Novosti)—The mother of the suspected Boston Marathon bombers was added to a US government terrorism database more than a year before last week’s attack, and she is suspected of having helped radicalize at least one of her sons, US media cited officials as saying Friday.
Zubeidat Tsarnaeva was included in the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE), a classified federal database, in 2011 at the request of US intelligence agencies, The Associated Press (AP) reported Friday.
Tsarnaeva was added to the database, which two years ago contained around 750,000 names, after Russia told the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) that she and her son, Tamerlan, had become religious militants, the AP reported.
It was unclear Friday whether Tsarnaeva’s name was still in the database, which is reviewed regularly. Individuals can be removed from the database if it is determined that they no longer meet the criteria for inclusion.
Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, who died in a shootout with police in the Boston suburb of Watertown last week, was also in the database.
He and his 19-year-old brother Dzhokhar, who is in a prison hospital in Massachusetts after surviving the shootout in which his brother was killed and evading a massive police manhunt for hours, are suspected of planting bombs at the finish line of the Boston Marathon last week that killed three people and injured more than 200.
US Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger, the top Democrat on the US House of Representatives’ intelligence committee, said Tsarnaeva was “a person of interest that we’re looking at to see if she helped radicalize her son or had contacts with other people or terrorist groups,” the Fox News television network reported Friday.
Another US lawmaker, Rep. Michael McCaul, said Tsarnaeva was suspected of playing a role in her son’s “radicalization process in terms of her influence over him (and) fundamental views of Islam,” the network reported.
Tsarnaeva, a naturalized US citizen, moved back to the restive Russian region of Dagestan several years ago. She was due to travel to the Boston area this week to see her surviving son and talk with investigators probing the marathon bombing case, but she canceled her trip at the last minute.
Tsarnaeva has called the terrorism accusations against her and her sons “lies and hypocrisy,” the AP said.
“I’m sick and tired of all this nonsense that they make up about me and my children,” she was quoted as saying. “People know me as a regular person, and I’ve never been mixed up in any criminal intentions, especially any linked to terrorism.”
Dagestan, where the suspected bombers lived with their family when they were younger, was described Friday by panelists at a Congressional hearing as a hotbed for Islamic extremists.
Inclusion in the US terrorism database does not mean a person is suspected of terrorist activity or that he or she is under surveillance or subject to travel restrictions, according to the website of the US National Counterterrorism Center, which manages the database.
