WASHINGTON, June 5 (RIA Novosti) – US lawmakers who traveled to Russia last week in connection with the deadly Boston Marathon bombing investigation gave mixed opinions on the sincerity of Russian security officials who provided information about suspected bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev in 2011, The Hill reported Wednesday.
“[Russia] wanted to help. And they got the message by implication that the FBI was not interested in examining Tamerlan,” US Rep. Steve King, a member of the delegation, told the newspaper.
Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) informed the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in a March 2011 letter that Tsarnaev, a Russian national with roots in the country’s restive North Caucasus region, was becoming radicalized.
The FSB says it never received a response from American counterparts to the warning, the Washington Post reported last weekend, and FBI chief Robert Mueller testified before the US Congress last month that federal authorities investigated the Russian tip-off but determined Tsarnaev was not a threat.
The FSB letter included personal information about Tsarnaev, including his cellphone number and his mother’s Skype handle, and asked US authorities to alert Russia if he planned to travel to Russia, the Post reported.
Tsarnaev was killed in a shoot-out with police in the days following the April 15 attack.
The FBI says it did respond to the Russian warning but says that it then never received a reply from Moscow to that response, an assertion backed by another member of the US delegation, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, The Hill said.
Rohrabacher told the newspaper that the FBI did not have information that could have prevented the attack, which killed three people and wounded more than 260.
“What could have stopped this is not something within the context of our current [U.S.-Russia] framework,” The Hill quoted Rohrabacher as saying. “But we need to change the overall relationship and that could have thwarted this attack, I have no doubt.”
King, however, told the newspaper that the FBI “has never been structured with an incentive to provide information to the public — and the FSB has an incentive to do that because they want to see strong relations.”
The FSB wants “to see the exchange of intelligence information so they can protect themselves from our universal enemy,” King was quoted by The Hill as saying.
A third member of the delegation cast doubts on Russia’s claims, citing the KGB, the Soviet-era security agency from which the FSB was spawned.
“Once the KGB, always the KGB,” the lawmaker told The Hill on condition of anonymity.
Rohrabacher told reporters in Moscow on Sunday that the Boston attack could have been averted but attributed the failure to do so more to lingering mistrust between Russian and US security agencies than to any single error on either side.
“We have allowed attitudes, maybe the attitudes from the Cold War, to remain in place that have prevented a level of cooperation that is justified,” The New York Times quoted Rohrabacher as saying.
A senior Russian politician, Valentina Matviyenko, was quoted Tuesday in Russian media as saying the US side failed to heed Russia’s warning about Tsarnaev.
