Night of terror with the Boston bomb suspects

It must have been the worst moment of his life: two men, one brandishing a gun, forced their way into his car and told him to start driving. A 26 year old Chinese man, known by his American nickname of Danny, has told the Boston Globe about the night he was carjacked by the Boston bomb suspects.

Danny drove around the area for an hour and a half while the Tsarnaev brothers made small talk in the back. At one stage Tamerlan asked him if he’d heard about the Boston bombing. “I did that.” He said he had just killed a police officer. They discussed travelling all the way to New York.

Danny told reporter Eric Moskowitz that he remembered thinking: “I don’t want to die. I have a lot of dreams that haven’t come true yet.” At times, he feared he was too terrified to drive in the right lane.

He managed to play on the fact that he was not American, telling the brothers: “Chinese are very friendly to Muslims!” It seemed to help.

I don’t want to die. I have a lot of dreams that haven’t come true yet. ‘Danny’, carjacked driver

In the end, what saved him was the utterly mundane: his car was getting low on fuel. The brothers directed him into a petrol station, on Memorial Drive in Cambridge, just across the river from Boston proper.

Danny siezed his chance to escape: as Tamerlan took his eye off the gun for just long enough, he ran across the highway into another gas station, where he managed to call 911.

Police later said it was Danny’s prompt action and accurate description that helped them to track down the hijacked car, and stop what could have been another deadly bomb attack which the brothers were planning to launch in New York.

“I don’t feel like a hero”, he told the Globe. “I was trying to save myself”. He may be asked to recount his story on the record, if he ends up a trial witness, giving evidence in court about what happened.

Ordinary heroism

Another driver, cabbie Jim Duggan, has also been recalling his encounter with the Tsarnaev brothers, the day before the bombing, when he gave them a ride in his taxi. He told CNN that as they got out, he almost forgot to hand them the two backpacks they had stowed in the boot.

“I get out, and they were angry”, he claimed, saying he had told them: “Sorry, I forgot! It was a mistake, people make mistakes.”

The surviving brother, 19 year old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, has now been transferred from hospital to a prison facility in Fort Devens in north central Massachussetts, set up to cater for detainees who require medical attention.

Although sources say that he communicated with federal investigators for about 16 hours, he stopped any form of contact after he had been advised of his right to remain silent, and has not volunteered any more information since.

Questions still remain over whether the FBI failed to spot the danger signs surrounding the Tsarnaevs. It has emerged that Tamlerlan had been placed on several government watch lists, inlcuding the highly classified Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE), followiong a tip-off from the Russian authorities in 2011.

CNN has reported that the suspects’ mother, Zubeidat Tsarnaeva, was also added to the TIDE list at the same time.

Terror watch lists

Nine months before the Boston attack, a single officer attached to a counter-terrorism task force was warned that a suspected militant had returned from a lengthy trip to Russia. However it is still not clear whether that officer passed on the information to anyone else.

Republican congressman Ed Royce, who chairs the House Foreign Affairs committee, said not enough had been done to monitor his activities, “especially given the fact that it wasn’t one heads-up we were given, but several”.

Back in Russia, the suspects’ parents are said to have moved from their home in Dagestan to another part of Russia. The father, Anzor, had declared he wanted to fly to the United States as soon as possible, “to find out the truth”.

However it now appears that his trip has been delayed indefinitely. Both parents continue to deny that their sons had any involvement in the Boston attack.