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Tsarnaevs Might’ve Had Help In Boston Marathon Attack, Prosecutors Say

Tsarnaevs Might’ve Had Help In Boston Marathon Attack, Prosecutors Say

By Richard A. Serrano, Tribune Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON — Federal prosecutors said Wednesday that the Tsarnaev brothers may have received help in building the two bombs that exploded at last year’s Boston Marathon, although they did not identify any potential suspects except to suggest the pair were inspired by al-Qaida operatives overseas.

In court papers, prosecutors said Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev had emptied hundreds of packages of fireworks to create fuel for the bombs. Yet no powder residue was found in their apartments or three vehicles, “strongly suggesting that others had built, or at least helped the Tsarnaevs build, the bombs, and thus might have built more” explosive devices, the documents say.

Prosecutors did not say whether they still believed that theory or were convinced now that the two immigrant brothers from the Russian republic of Dagestan had acted alone when they allegedly detonated two homemade bombs that killed three people and injured more than 260 near the finish line of the race on April 15, 2013.

Prosecutors also revealed several new details about the bombs. They said the fuses were fashioned from Christmas lights and the improvised remote-control detonators were built from model car parts.

“These relatively sophisticated devices would have been difficult for the Tsarnaevs to fabricate successfully without training or assistance from others,” prosecutors wrote.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, died after a shootout with police four days after the bombing. His younger brother, Dzhokhar, now 20, was wounded and captured in a boat stored in a nearby yard in Watertown, a Boston suburb.

In notes found in the boat, scrawled in pencil, he defended the bombings as retaliation for Americans killing “innocent civilians” abroad, authorities say. He also wrote that he was “jealous” of his slain brother.

“I do not mourn because his soul is very much alive,” he wrote. “God has a plan for each person. Mine was to hide in this boat and shed some light on our actions.”

Prosecutors said the writing “bears hallmarks of al-Qaida-inspired rhetoric, suggested that Tsarnaev might have received instruction from a terrorist group.” They said his repeated use of the word “we” suggested that “others might be poised to commit similar attacks and that Tsarnaev was urging them on.”

Tsarnaev faces 30 charges and could face the death penalty if convicted in connection with the bombings. Prosecutors filed the papers to oppose a motion by Tsarnaev’s lawyers to keep his statements to the FBI, made while he was hospitalized after his capture, from being used in court.

The defense contends that he gave the statements under duress, when he was sedated.

But prosecutors said the FBI questioned Tsarnaev under a public safety provision in the law that allows authorities to hastily gather information if they believe lives are in jeopardy.

“The government did nothing wrong,” prosecutors said.

At the hospital, they said, Tsarnaev “readily admitted” that he and his brother had carried out the bombings. They said he was “responsive, coherent and clear-headed.”

Timothy A. Clary AFP

Explosions Kill 31 At Market In China’s Troubled Xinjiang Region

Explosions Kill 31 At Market In China’s Troubled Xinjiang Region

By Barbara Demick, Los Angeles Times

BEIJING — Two explosive-laden cars plowed into a crowded morning market in Urumqi on Thursday, leaving 31 people dead and 94 injured in the deadliest in a spate of terrorist attacks in China.

The attack took place about 8 a.m. outside the People’s Park, which was crowded with senior citizens who had just finished their morning exercises and were eating breakfast at the market.

State news media said the vehicles crashed through police security fences and plowed into the crowds while the occupants tossed explosives through the windows. One of the vehicles exploded.

Authorities did not comment on the ethnicity of the attackers, although witnesses suggested they were Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking, Muslim population that used to be the majority in Xinjang, China’s northwestern-most region.

“Two 4500s (Toyota Land Cruisers) with little flags in the Uighur language just drove past me hitting anyone in their way. And then there were a chain of explosions,” wrote Zhang Xiaoyu, general manager of a news portal in Urumqi. The post was later deleted by censors.

“The scene is unbearable. There are many people dead,” wrote one witness on the Internet, who posted photographs of the scene.

From the high initial death toll, it looks as though the attack would prove even deadlier than a March 1 knife attack at the Kunming railroad station in which 33 died, one of the worst such incidents in recent memory.

“I saw flames and heavy smoke as vehicles and goods were on fire while vendors escaped leaving their goods behind,” another witness wrote online. He said he was less than 100 yards from the scene.

Photographs showed vendors lying bloodied on the pavements amid overturned tables of bananas and potatoes. An elderly woman with blood streaming from her forehead sat on the pavement looking over a young woman lying prone on the street.

The attacks came amid a spate of bombings and knifings attributed to Uighur separatists, who complain about Chinese restrictions on the Uighurs’ religion, language and freedom of movement.

During a visit last month to the region by President Xi Jinping, the Urumqi train station was attacked by knife- and bomb-wielding assailants. Three people died. An unverified claim of responsibility for the attack was released shortly afterward by the Turkestan Islamic Party, a shadowy separatist group that operates out of Pakistan and uses the name East Turkestan to refer to Xinjiang.

The Lanzhou-based Central Asia Studies Institute says more than 170 people have died in China since the beginning of 2013 as a result of Uighur separatist attacks.

“Why don’t you let us have a stable life? East Turkestan separatists get out of my hometown!” one microblogger wrote on Weibo after Thursday’s attack.

“Most victims are elderly. Lunatics! Animals!” another wrote.

Urumqi was also the scene of ethnic riots in 2009 that left nearly 200 people dead, most of them Han, the ethnic majority in China.

Photo: akasped via Flickr

Minnesota Teen Is Charged With Plot To Go On School Rampage

Minnesota Teen Is Charged With Plot To Go On School Rampage

By Pat Pheifer, Star Tribune (Minneapolis)

MINNEAPOLIS — A Waseca, Minn., teenager who idolized the Columbine High School shooters plotted to murder his parents and sister, then go on a rampage through Waseca’s junior high and high school, setting off pressure cooker bombs, throwing Molotov cocktails and gunning down fleeing students, according to criminal charges filed Thursday.

John David LaDue, 17, allegedly detailed his plans in a 180-page notebook, police say. He’d been amassing a stockpile of handguns, automatic weapons and bomb-making equipment in his bedroom and in a storage unit, the charges claim.

He intended to carry out his attack on April 20, the 15-year anniversary of the Columbine shootings in Littleton, Colo., that killed 13 people. But he scrapped that plan when he realized April 20 was Easter Sunday, police said, and authorities believe he was instead planning the attack for the next few weeks.

“I think he had put enough preparation and forethought into this … that he was well on his way to carrying it out,” said Capt. Kris Markeson of the Waseca Police Department.

After his arrest, LaDue told police he intended to kill “as many students as he could,” the criminal complaint said.

LaDue was caught when a witness saw him enter the storage unit at Mini Max storage in Waseca on Tuesday evening and close the door behind him. Thinking it suspicious, the bystander called police, who found LaDue inside with his stockpile of equipment, which included “numerous materials commonly used for making explosive devices,” the complaint said.

They discovered evidence including ammo boxes, a scale, a pressure cooker box and packing material for red iron oxide, the complaint said. It appears that LaDue obtained many of his bomb-making materials and instructions over the Internet, Markeson said.

LaDue apparently didn’t expect to survive his attack, figuring that he’d be shot by a SWAT team during his attack, the complaint said.

Police say LaDue admitted to setting off small bombs at the playground at Hartley Elementary School in March, as well as at other locations around town, to practice for his plot.

Neighbors said LaDue, a junior at the high school, is quiet. Many remarked that he was often seen in his family’s yard, throwing knives and axes at a tree.

“This little boy was shy,” said Bailey Root, 19, a neighbor who said she grew up with LaDue. “He never talked. He always followed the leader. He was never one to step up and do anything.”

LaDue never got into trouble at school and was on the B honor roll, said Waseca Schools Superintendent Tom Lee.

LaDue appeared in court Thursday morning and was sent to a juvenile detention center in Red Wing. He’d been detained at such a center in Rochester after his arrest, but that facility refused to take him back after he made “homicidal threats” against staff members, said Assistant Waseca County Attorney Brenda Miller.

LaDue is charged with four counts of attempted premeditated first-degree murder, two counts of first-degree damage to property and six counts of possession of a bomb by someone under 18. His next court hearing is set for May 12.

Waseca is about 80 miles south of Minneapolis, about 15 miles west of Owatonna.

Photo: Mike Saechang via Flickr

Pair Of Car Bombs Explode In Syrian City Of Homs

Pair Of Car Bombs Explode In Syrian City Of Homs

By Patrick J. McDonnell, Los Angeles Times

BEIRUT — A pair of car bombs exploded Wednesday in a busy residential district in the central Syrian city of Homs, killing at least 25 civilians and wounding more than 100, Syria’s official media reported.

The state news agency blamed the attacks on “terrorists,” the government’s standard description of rebels fighting to oust the government of President Bashar Assad.

A pro-opposition group, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, also reported the two car bomb attacks.

Syrian state television aired scenes of charred vehicles, blood-spattered streets and black smoke pouring from damaged buildings as firefighters rushed to douse blazes.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the bombings, the first of which occurred when a parked car exploded on a busy street near a popular sweet shop, state media reported. The second bomb detonated nearby about half an hour later as people gathered near the site of the initial attack, according to government reports.

The vehicles exploded in the city’s Karm al-Louz district, home to many members of the minority Alawite sect, whose numbers include Assad and high-ranking commanders of the Syrian security services.

Alawite neighborhoods and towns in Homs, Damascus and elsewhere have been frequent targets of rebel attacks in the more than three-year Syrian conflict. Government forces have focused their bombardment on rebel-occupied districts that are usually home mostly to Sunni Muslims, the majority population in Syria.

Wednesday’s attacks came as rumors spread that the Syrian military may be planning an assault on Homs’ Old City, which has been largely under opposition control for more than two years.

There has been no official confirmation of an impending offensive against the Old City. Pro-government forces surround the district and the 1,000 or so residents said to be left suffer from lack of food, medical care and basic services. In February, more than 1,400 people, including many former rebel fighters, left the Old City under safe passage in a United Nations-backed evacuation plan.

Most residents long ago fled from the Old City. Homs, once home to about 2 million people, has been a major front in the war.

Many Homs neighborhoods, including much of the Old City and the adjoining Khalidiya district, have been largely reduced to rubble in a withering conflict that has cost more than 100,000 lives nationwide and sent millions of Syrians fleeing from their homes.

While the Syrian military has made steady gains, violence continues to wrack Homs and surrounding areas.

On Sunday, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported that more than two dozen rebels were killed in the Old City when a vehicle that was being rigged as a car bomb detonated prematurely. Such bombs, sometimes driven by suicide attackers, have been potent weapons in the arsenal of the Syrian opposition.

A day later, an elderly Jesuit priest, Father Frans Van der Lugt, was assassinated by gunmen at his residence in the Old City. Each side blamed the other for the execution of the Dutch priest. He had lived in Syria for almost five decades and had declined to be evacuated, saying he preferred to remain and continue serving the people of his community, Christian and Muslim alike.

AFP Photo/Karam al-Masri