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Boston Marathon Bombing Facts

Boston Marathon Bombing Facts
The Boston Marathon Bombing was a terrorist attack bombing that took place during the annual Boston Marathon on April 15, 2013. The bombing took place near the finish line of the race and left three people dead and more than 260 injured, seventeen of those people losing limbs. The bombers were quickly revealed to be two ethnic Chechen brothers, twenty-six-year-old Soviet Union born Tamerlan Tsarnaev and nineteen-year-old Kyrgyzstan born Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. The brothers were inspired by radical Islam and learned how to make their pressure cooker bombs from an al-Qaeda website. Closed circuit television (CCTV) cameras showed the two men at the site of the bombing, which when made public led to tips that made them the FBI's top suspects. After the brothers were identified on April 18, they attempted to violently evade arrest. They killed a Massachusetts Institute of Technology security guard and carjacked another man in the Boston suburbs before they were surrounded by law enforcement. Both men were shot by the police and it is alleged that Dzhokhar ran Tamerlan over during the escape. Tamerlan died of his wounds, while Dzhokhar was arrested, convicted of federal terrorism related charges, and sentenced to death. The Boston Marathon Bombing is notable because it was a classic example of a "lone wolf" attack, which are incredibly difficult to stop.
Interesting Boston Marathon Bombing Facts:
The brothers emigrated from Kyrgyzstan in 2002 with their parents and two sisters as political refugees.
Father Anzor and mother Zubeidat worked odd jobs while living in Massachusetts, but received public assistance as well.
At the time of the bombings, Dzhokhar was a student at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth and Tamerlan was a successful martial arts fighter and boxer. Both identified as Muslims, but had non-Muslim friends and weren't known to be radical until 2008.
Tamerlan won the amateur the amateur New England Golden Gloves boxing competition in 2010.
In 2008, Tamerlan joined a more radical mosque known as the Islamic Society of Boston in Cambridge, Massachusetts and quit smoking and drinking.
The bombing consisted of two pressure cooker bombs that were detonated about 200 yards apart near the finish line of the race at 2:49 pm.
Despite the carnage, runners continued to cross the finish line for nearly ten more minutes.
The winners of the marathon, Lelisa Desisa Benti for the men and Rita Jeptoo for the women, about three hours before the bombings.
Tamerlan had been radicalized long before Dzhokhar, and in fact some believe the younger brother wasn't radicalized at all, but was just going along with his older brother. The primary Russian intelligence agency, the FSB, had warned American authorities about Tamerlan's growing radicalism.
Tamerlan was a suspect in the triple murder of three men Waltham, Massachusetts on September 11, 2011. Although Tamerlan was friends with one of the men, he wasn't initially a suspect. After the Boston Marathon Bombing, the authorities took another look at the case. The date of the murders, the fact that at least two of the three victims were Jewish, and the fact that no money or marijuana - of which there was plenty of both in the residence - were taken has led authorities to believe the murders were either personal, political, or both.


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