What do Boston suspects’ online accounts tell us?
Little is known about the brothers believed to be behind the Boston Marathon bomb attacks, but their social networking accounts and online posts help provide insight into their motivation.
Police are still hunting 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, while his 26-year-old brother Tamerlan Tsarnaev died in a gun battle with police this morning.
The Tsarnaevs are believed to have been in the US for a number of years, having fled Chechnya with their family. An amateur boxer, Tamerlan weighed 196 pounds and regularly trained at a local mixed martial arts centre in Allston, a Boston suburb.
One apparent insight into the brothers comes from an online photo album by documentary photographer Johannes Hirn which features one man identified on the album as Boston suspect Tamerlan. The man tells how he is a strict Muslim and claims his half-Italian girlfriend is a recent convert.
He is quoted as telling photographer Hirn: “I don’t have a single American friend, I don’t understand them”, adding that his family had come to the US from Chechnya via Kazakhstan.
They do not deserve to exist on this earth. Ruslan Tsarni, uncle
The photographs show the man in white shoes with sunglasses, posing near his Mercedes. He tells the photographer he does not drink or smoke: “God said no alcohol.” He adds that “there are no values anymore” and says he worries that “people can’t control themselves.”
Online records show Dzhokhar Tsarnaev attended Cambridge Rindge and Latin School in the class of 2011 becoming one of 45 people to received a $2,500 scholarship from the city of Cambridge.
Before moving to the United States, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev attended a school in Makhachkala, the capital of Dagestan, a predominantly Muslim republic in Russia’s North Caucasus. The area has become an epicentre of the Islamic insurgency that spilled over from Chechnya.
As a high-school wrestler, Dzhokhar was named as student athlete of the month for February 2011. He was also the Greater Boston Leaguer winter all-star in the same year. A bizarre posting left under the suspect’s name is an entry on a petition about saving ducks and chickens in Cambridge – he left the comment “leave the chickens”.
YouTube accounts
The pair apparently identify as Muslim – on a profile on Vkontakte, the Russian version of Facebook, under the name of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, an entry lists his world view as Islam, and YouTube accounts in the name of both brothers show they have “liked” Sunni Islam videos.
Tamerlan’s One account contained a now-deleted category called “Terrorists”, and the other brother had liked a number of videos showing Russian Imam Khamzat-haji Chumakov, who denounces bloodshed. The cleric is said to have a cult following among young Muslims.
On an obscure blog discussing Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink, Dzhokhar commented: “This book was very interesting but the idea that a person can predict whether you and your partner are going to be together in the future is honestly a little hard to believe.”
Family reaction
Their uncle, Ruslan Tsarni, who lives in Washington, confirmed the men lived together and had been in the United States for about a decade. They came from a Russian region that has been plagued by Islamic insurgency.
He told reporters: “They do not deserve to exist on this earth.”
The suspects’ father said his younger son was a second-year medical student and “a true angel”.
“My son is a true angel,” Anzor Tsarnaev said by telephone from the Russian city of Makhachkala. “Dzhokhar is a second-year medical student in the US He is such an intelligent boy. We expected him to come on holidays here.”