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As the investigation of the Boston Marathon bombings continues, one of the more clouded aspects is the tale of “Misha,” a mysterious US-based Islamist who has been accused by members of the Tsarnaev family of radicalizing Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the elder of the two alleged bombers. “It started in 2009. And it started right there, in Cambridge,” Tamerlan’s uncle, Ruslan Tsarni, told CNN after the attacks. “This person just took his brain. He just brainwashed him completely.” These accusations set off a frenzied search for what some reports have called an Islamic Svengali, and over the past few days, the FBI...

A slain Canadian jihadi gave Russian counter-terrorism agents the tip that put alleged Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev on their radar two years ago, Bay State U.S. Rep. William R. Keating confirmed yesterday — raising questions about whether Tsarnaev’s direct link to the known militant was ever passed on to the FBI or local authorities. Keating told the Herald yesterday his staff in Russia has learned William Plotnikov, while under interrogation in the militant hotbed of Dagestan, named Tsarnaev as a fellow extremist. “That’s when the Russian government started looking at Tamerlan and he showed up on a jihadist website,”...

<p>The claim that the Russians somehow “warned” the U.S. about Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s radical Islamic connections has been accepted by most news organizations and commentators as established fact. But while U.S. intelligence agencies have a lot to explain, the Russian security services have been treated with kid gloves and even as the “good guys” in this affair.</p>

"One thing remains unclear though – how the young man could walk out of the boat he was hiding in already with a throat wound that he was later almost dying from."

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Do you know now that the Boston Marathon bombing is the Russians' fault? That's right. Folks, there's more going on here than the regime wants anybody to know, I'm convinced now. "Russian authorities secretly recorded a telephone conversation in 2011 in which one of the Boston bombing suspects vaguely discussed jihad with his mother, officials said Saturday, days after the US government finally received details about the call. In another conversation, the mother of now-dead bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev was recorded talking to someone in southern Russia who is under FBI investigation in an unrelated case, officials...

The timing certainly looks … intriguing. On Sunday morning, Russian forces raided the compound of an Islamist network once run by Abu Dujan in the Caucasus — a leader whose videos were in Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s YouTube page. The raid killed the brother of the current leader: It could also be a coincidence. Nick Paton Walsh reports for CNN that the Russians have been conducting these raids for months in an effort to tamp down Islamist activities in the Caucasus. The Russians aren’t drawing a connection between the two cases, at least not publicly. However, Abu Dujan’s network operated in Dagestan...