Boston, suspected attackers may have trained in Chechen Islamic school

Boston, suspected attackers may
have trained in Chechen Islamic school

The United States celebrates the arrest of Dzhokhar
Tsarnaev, a Chechen immigrant and brother of the main suspect in the attack on
the Boston Marathon. The Russian news agencies dig into the past of the two
young men. Tamerlan, the eldest, who was killed yesterday in a firefight, had a
page on Youtube with links to sites close to Islamic terrorism.



Boston (AsiaNews / Agencies): A Youtube site linked to pages
glorifying terrorism, a certificate of attendance at a school in Makhachkala,
capital of Dagestan (Chechnya), and several references to the Islamic religion:
this is the profile of the Tsarnaev brothers, prime suspects in the Boston
massacre on April 14 last, both defined by the press as "devout Muslims". The
revelations have already spread on U.S. media and arrived in Russia reported by
Interfax news agency.
The Moscow based network of has investigated the
recent past of Tamerla Tsarnaev, 26 years old, killed
yesterday by U.S. security forces and Dzhokhar, his younger brother, 19 years
old, captured by police last night, after a massive man hunt. The young man was
wounded and had taken refuge in a boat in Watertown. In a statement to the
nation, President Obama said that the U.S. would not give in to terrorism "but
there are still so many questions to be answered."
Both of Chechen origin, but born in Kyrgyzstan,
the two brothers had immigrated to the United States in 2003 and lived in
Cambridge, a suburb of Boston. The eldest, Tamerlan, was a former engineering
student. In 2012 he opened a page on Youtube with his name. According to the
data of the account in the Russian language, the young man navigated suspicious
sites, close to radical Islam. Among the films uploaded, many touch on
"conversion to Islam" and "Islamic terrorism." From 1999 to 2001, the young man
is reported to have attended a school in Dagestan. In his application he is
reported to have made reference to his devotion to Islam. However, the latter
source is yet to be verified.
Instead Dzhokhar attended a medical school in one
of the universities in Boston. The characteristics of the two suspects have
sparked headlines that already blame the attack on Islamic extremism of a
Caucasian matrix. Last night, Ed Davis, head of the Boston Police pointed out
that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was considered very dangerous: "We think he is a
terrorist. We believe that this is a man who has come here to kill".
Despite police statements calling for caution, the
wider public has jumped to hasty conclusions. Today, the U.S. Secretary of State
John Kerry called on the media not to speculate on the past of the two brothers
and their alleged and still not certain ties with Islam to avoid deflecting
investigations onto ideological prejudices rather than the facts.
The allegations of the U.S. media on Caucasian
terrorism, was immediately condemned by Chechen prime minister Ramzan Kadyrov,
The Russian republic is one of two areas of Muslim majority, along with
Dagestan. He pointed out that the suspects lived only for a few years in
Makhachkala, while they were mainly educated in the United States. "According to
Kadyrov," the roots of this evil are to be found in the United States and
nowhere else. "
After the so-called "pacification" of Chechnya,
Dagestan has become the most unstable among the republics of the Russian
Caucasus, where after installing the pro-Russian Kadyrov in Grozny, Moscow
continues to fight Islamist insurgents who are fighting for the creation of an
emirate. In recent years a real bombing campaign has been waged against
religious officials, in response to their explicit criticism of radical Islam in
local mosques, at the request of the Kremlin.