The Unexplained Connection Between the FBI and Two Muslim Friends Killed by Law Enforcement
As the penalty phase of the trial of convicted Boston Bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev winds down, one key question remains unresolved: what exactly was the FBI’s relationship with his older brother Tamerlan before the bombings?
WhoWhatWhy has raised the question again and again (see here and here). Tsarnaev’s defense team brought it up in court papers, and even a sitting senator has taken the issue seriously enough to ask the FBI repeatedly about it. The Bureau was forced to admit that it investigated and interacted with the elder Tsarnaev, but steadfastly denies it ever attempted to recruit him as an informant.
But did he play some other role? And can we take the FBI at its word?
Even The Boston Globe’s Kevin Cullen is wondering whether “the FBI knows far more about Tamerlan Tsarnaev than it’s sharing.”
An Eerie Parallel
It’s important to note that the term “informant” is a catch-all that may suggest a range of sub rosa relationships not covered in the FBI’s official definition. What’s certain is that the Bureau has a long history of recruiting vulnerable foreign nationals to infiltrate the plots of would-be terrorists.
And in a deepening of the mystery of Tsarnaev’s relationship with the feds, it turns out there’s an eerie parallel: the FBI’s little-known, pre-bombing relationship with Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s close friend, Ibragim Todashev.
Todashev was shot and killed in his Florida apartment by an FBI agent on May 22, 2013, about a month after his friend Tamerlan was shot and killed during the post-Marathon Bombing manhunt. Todashev was shot while being questioned, supposedly about his and Tamerlan’s alleged involvement in a separate matter: a 2011 drug-related, triple homicide in Waltham, Massachusetts.
But some of Todashev’s friends say he believed that FBI agents had another motive entirely for interrogating him: they wanted to find out what if anything he knew about Tamerlan’s earlier interactions with the Bureau.
The FBI, other law enforcement agencies, and the mainstream media have told several radically conflicting stories of the Todashev shooting, none of which has ever made much sense. One thing however is clear— whatever information he may have had about Tamerlan’s interactions with the Bureau have been taken with him to the grave.
Intriguingly, in the same way the FBI interacted with Tamerlan Tsarnaev long before he became an alleged terrorist and was killed in a gun battle with law enforcement, the FBI had an unexplained interaction with Todashev before killing him.
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