WASHINGTON, May 16 (RIA Novosti) – The director of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) on Thursday conceded that the bureau failed to respond to information about suspected Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s trip last year to Russia, where intelligence services there had alerted their US counterparts to his alleged turn toward radical Islam.
The notice from a government watch list about Tsarnaev’s visit was sent to a member of the US Justice Department’s Joint Terrorism Task Force, but no action “was taken on that particular notification,” FBI Director Robert Mueller told US lawmakers in congressional testimony Thursday, Politico reported.
Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, and the other suspect in the bombings, his 19-year-old brother Dzhokhar, are ethnic Chechens from southern Russia who were living in Massachusetts.
Tamerlan traveled to Russia in early 2012, and the FBI received but did not act on another alert from the watch list when he returned about six months later, the newspaper cited Mueller as saying.
“It may well have been because of the numerous inquiries that we handle,” Politico cited the FBI chief as saying. “ … That particular Joint Terrorism Task Force in any given year handles hundreds of similar assessments and leads and the like.”
Mueller said the FBI would “do better” next time should a similar situation arise, but he also defended the bureau’s handling of the March 2011 tip from Russian authorities suggesting Tsarnaev was becoming radicalized, US media reported.
After the tip-off, US authorities investigated Tsarnaev but determined he was not a threat, Mueller told the US Senate Appropriations Committee’s subcommittee on commerce, justice and science.
“As a result of this, I would say, thorough investigation, based on the leads we got from the Russians, we found no ties to terrorism,” Mueller said, The Washington Post reported.
Surveillance videos near the finish line of the Boston Marathon on April 15 show two men who authorities believe to be Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev placing backpacks on the ground thought to contain pressure cookers filled with explosives and shrapnel minutes before the twin explosions.
Three people were killed and more than 260 others were injured, many of them critically. Tamerlan Tsarnaev was killed during a shootout with police on April 19.
Dzhokhar was captured hours later and is being held at a federal medical detention center in Devens, Massachusetts, charged with using a weapon of mass destruction.
