(Photo released by the FBI)
By Mariano Andrade (AFP) – BOSTON, Massachusetts — Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, suspected of bombing the Boston marathon, appear to hail from Russia’s war-torn Chechnya but had been in the United States for several years.
The North Caucasus region of Chechnya has been ravaged by two back-to-back wars since 1994 between Russia’s army and increasingly Islamist-leaning separatist rebels, and the mountainous region still sees occasional fighting.
A US law enforcement official would only say on condition of anonymity that the two brothers were Russian, but online profiles with pictures strongly resembling their wanted posters describe them as Muslim refugees.
NBC News reported that they hail from Chechnya, but they appear to have left during the wars and spent time in Central Asia.
Dzhokhar, a baby-faced 19-year-old still at large, won a scholarship in 2011 while enrolled at the Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, a public high school. He was also named a Greater Boston League Winter All Star wrestler that year.
In a profile on a Russian-language site similar to Facebook, he says he speaks Chechen and includes several links to a North Caucasus comic.
Tamerlan, 26 — who was killed during the police chase — appears to have been featured in an online photo essay by Johannes Hirn entitled “Will Box for Passport,” in which he says he has been living in America for five years.
“I don’t have a single American friend, I don’t understand them,” he is quoted as saying under one of several pictures of him boxing at the Wai Kru Mixed Martial Arts Center, a gym mentioned in an online profile in his name.
The website says Tamerlan, who was studying engineering at Bunker Hill Community College, had taken a year off to train for the National Golden Gloves competition in Salt Lake City, Utah.
It says he is originally from Chechnya but left because of the conflict in the 1990s and spent years in Kazakhstan before coming to the United States as a refugee.
But Ruslan Tsarni, identified by CNN as the boys’ uncle, said in an interview broadcast by the network that they grew up in Kyrgyzstan, a former Soviet Central Asian republic.
On the website, Tamerlan is quoted as saying he aspires to be an Olympic boxer, but would rather compete for the United States than for Russia in the absence of an independent Chechnya.
He is quoted as describing himself as “very religious” and saying, “God said no alcohol.”
“There are no values anymore,” he is quoted as saying. “People can’t control themselves.”
But another caption says his favorite movie is “Borat,” and one picture shows him with a blonde woman whom he describes as his half-Italian, half-Portuguese girlfriend, saying she converted to Islam. “She’s beautiful, man!”
