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As our colleagues David Herszenhorn and Andrew Kramer report, the parents of the two brothers accused in the bombings at the Boston Marathon insisted on Thursday that their sons were innocent and had no connection to radical Islam.
Speaking at a news conference in Dagestan, the parents, Anzor Tsarnaev and Zubeidat Tsarnaeva, also made accusations of a conspiracy in which they say their older son, Tamerlan, 26, was killed by authorities after he was captured in Watertown, Mass., in the early morning hours of April 19.
As evidence, Ms. Tsarnaeva described grainy video footage on the Internet showing a man being put into a police car, naked, having apparently been stripped to check for explosives. At the time, some news organizations mistakenly identified him as a suspect. The next day, Ms. Tsarnaeva said, she saw gruesome images of Tamerlan’s dead body that were circulated on the Internet.
“They put him into the police car where he walked naked, naked, and they are saying that it is not my son,†she said. “But I know my son. I know my son. I know the body of my son who I raised from this size.â€
“He was alive,†she said. “Why did they need to kill him?â€
Ms. Tsarnaeva has dismissed the official account in the United States that Tamerlan died either in a gun battle with police or when he was struck and dragged by a car driven by his younger brother, Dzhokhar, who was trying to escape. Dzhokhar was later captured and has been charged in the bombings.
The medical examiner’s officer has not yet ruled on a cause of death for Tamerlan.
Our colleagues have provided a detailed account of the pursuit of both suspects, which began late Thursday after the shooting of an M.I.T. police officer in Cambridge, led to a gun battle on a quiet residential street in Watertown and ended Friday night with the discovery of Dzhokhar hiding in a boat parked in a nearby backyard. It answers many questions raised in recent days, including whether the younger suspect was armed when he was captured.
In addition to news reports and official statements, there are accounts from ordinary people who used video, images and Twitter posts to document the shootout taking place outside their homes in real time.
Andrew Kitzenberg, who lives on Laurel Street in Watertown, where the gun battle took place, told New York Times reporters at the time, and has since written on his blog, that he was in his living room when he heard multiple “pops†coming from outside at around 12:45 a.m.
When I looked outside my window, I could clearly see two people (the Tsarnaev brothers) taking cover behind an SUV and engaging in gunfire. After witnessing shots being fired I promptly ran up the stairs to my third-floor bedroom to distance myself a little further away from the gunfire. As I ran into my room, overwhelmed by shock, adrenaline and curiosity, I jumped onto my bed to stay below the windows but also have a clear view at the shooters and photograph the event. As soon as I was laying safely on my bed I started taking pictures with my iPhone 5 and captured the following images that documented the terrifying shootout with the Tsarnaev brothers, which then led to an overnight citywide manhunt.
Like so many other images of the Boston Marathon bombing, the video of the naked man has been widely shared, and his identity and why he was ushered into a police car have become much-discussed mysteries. Left unexplained, these questions have become part of a collection of conspiracy theories and loose ends that have cropped up in the aftermath of the bombings and the shootout.
Lt. Michael Lawn of the Watertown Police Department said in an e-mailed statement that the naked man seen in the video was not Tamerlan Tsarnaev. He did not provide any other details.
Amanda Cox, a spokeswoman for the F.B.I., said that the agency had only two suspects, the Tsarnaev brothers, and had no information about any other possible suspects. Asked about the man in the video, she said, “We are not aware of any arrests.†There is a possibility, though, that someone could have been taken into custody at the local level.
The Boston Globe blog reported this week that the man seen in the video was detained and released as officers searched for the second Tsarnaev brother, Dzhokhar.
Jess Bidgood, a reporter for The New York Times who has been covering the story in Boston, said she saw the man put into a police car at the intersection of Dexter and Nichols Avenues, down the block from Laurel Street, where the standoff was taking place, between about 12:30 and 1:30 a.m. Ms. Bidgood said she was almost entirely sure that she later saw the same man, with a jacket hanging off him, being taken out of the car and talking with authorities in F.B.I. jackets. They appeared to photograph him, she said, and then he was put into a car again.
