MOSCOW, May 4 (RIA Novosti) – Dozens of protesters have gathered outside the Massachusetts funeral parlor where the body of suspected Boston bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev is being held, and local cemeteries are proving reluctant to provide a gravesite for the body, the funeral parlor director told the Associated Press on Friday.
“My problem here is trying to find a gravesite,” Peter Stefan told the AP. “A lot of people don’t want to do it. They don’t want to be involved with this.”
Tsarnaev, who was killed in a shootout with police on April 19, is suspected together with his younger brother Dzhokhar of planting two bombs at the finish line of the Boston Marathon that killed three people and injured more than 200 on April 15.
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, was detained later on April 19 following a massive manhunt in Boston, and is being held at a prison medical facility in Massachusetts.
Stefan, who on Friday revealed that the causes of death listed on the 26-year-old Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s death certificate were gunshot wounds and blunt trauma, also said a second autopsy could be performed on the body in the near future, the Boston Globe reported Saturday.
The funeral home director told the newspaper that he believed a repeat autopsy had been requested by defense lawyers for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who is charged with using a weapon of mass destruction, a crime that carries the death penalty.
Stefan said the second autopsy could be performed on Saturday, and that it was not a lengthy procedure.
Tsarnaev’s body was released by the authorities on Thursday and later taken to Stefan’s Graham Putnam and Mahoney Funeral Parlors in the city of Worcester, 60 kilometers from Boston, after originally having been taken to a different funeral parlor, where about 20 protesters gathered, according to the Associated Press
