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The latest news on the Boston Marathon bombing is that two suspects have been identified: brothers Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26. Tamerlan has since died after a confrontation with police in Watertown, Mass., while Dzhokhar is still on the run. Details are sketchy, but the general picture seems to be that the Tsarnaev family is from Chechnya, a republic in southern Russia (i.e., the Russian Caucasus). Since the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991, Chechnya has had a bloody history involving attempts to gain independence from Russia, with subsequent Russian crackdowns and attacks by Chechen terrorists. The...

BOSTON — It was a blow the immigrant boxer could not withstand: after capturing his second consecutive title as the Golden Gloves heavyweight champion of New England in 2010, Tamerlan Anzorovich Tsarnaev, 23, was barred from the national Tournament of Champions because he was not a United States citizen. The cocksure fighter, a flamboyant dresser partial to white fur and snakeskin, had been looking forward to redeeming the loss he suffered the previous year in the first round, when the judges awarded his opponent the decision, drawing boos from spectators who considered Mr. Tsarnaev dominant. From one year to the...

EXCLUSIVE: Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev sent text messages to his mother as early as 2011 suggesting he was willing to die for Islam, the FBI told lawmakers this week according to two officials with knowledge of the Capitol Hill briefing.

That the older Boston bombing suspect, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, became a terrorist strikes one as disturbing. That younger brother Dzhokhar also became a terrorist strikes one as frightening. Adjusting to new country can be trying and stressful. The brothers' parents came to America, only to return to Russia. Tamerlan came at age 16. A widely reported quote attributed to Tamerlan from 2010 says: "I don't have one American friend. I don't understand them." According to his aunt, Tamerlan became a devout Muslim. He reportedly once stood up and shouted down his imam for praising Martin Luther King. One shocked witness recalled...

The discovery that Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev lived in the United States for a decade produced a spate of theorizing over “homegrown” terrorism and terrorists. Baseball, Google and iPhones are homegrown. There is nothing “homegrown” about Islamic terrorism, which is taught, bought and paid for by international sponsors, primarily Iran and Wahabi Saudi Arabia. ... jihadists buy people living in the United States — often immigrants or first generation Americans — doesn’t make the terror less a foreign import. A 2007 NYPD study Radicalization in the West: the Homegrown Threat concluded that “Susceptible people seek an identity or a cause...

In the years before the Boston Marathon bombings, Tamerlan Tsarnaev fell under the influence of a new friend, a Muslim convert who steered the religiously apathetic young man toward a strict strain of Islam, family members said. Under the tutelage of a friend known to the Tsarnaev family only as Misha, Tamerlan gave up boxing and stopped studying music, his family said. He began opposing the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He turned to websites and literature claiming that the CIA was behind the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and Jews controlled the world. “Somehow, he just took his...

Boston Marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev was an ardent reader of jihadist websites and extremist propaganda, U.S. officials said Tuesday, adding another piece to the body of evidence they say suggests the two brothers were motivated by an anti-American, radical version of Islam. ---snip--- On Tuesday, two officials said the older brother frequently looked at extremist sites, including Inspire magazine, an English-language online publication produced by al-Qaida's Yemen affiliate. The magazine has endorsed lone-wolf terror attacks....

In America, he had been a cocky and charismatic heavyweight boxer who wore fancy pointy leather shoes and slick white shirts down to the gym. In Dagestan, the volatile southern Russian region where he lived for a time as a teen and returned to spend the first half of 2012, he became a quiet young man who spent his days online studying Islam, nursing a growing anger against heretics.

'Dead terror suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev's best friend had his 'throat slit' in an unsolved murder in 2011 as family members today told of how he was known to 'manipulate and use' his brother. The older of the suspected marathon bombers was the black sheep of the family who 'used his younger brother' and had fallen out with an uncle he called on the eve of his death, relatives have said. It has emerged the terror suspect's best friend died in a gruesome unsolved murder two years ago, just after Tamerlan said he had 'one single American friend'.'

The two young brothers from Cambridge seemed to be on promising paths, one a scholarship student at college, the other fighting for a national title in amateur boxing. And then, apparently with little warning, they veered violently off track, deep into the darkness, setting off deadly bombs, authorities are convinced, at one of Boston’s most iconic and joyful events. To those who knew them, the apparent transformation of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19 — ethnic Chechens, born in the former Soviet territory now known as Kyrgyzstan and transplanted to a working-class Inman Square neighborhood — seemed almost inconceivable....