Yet more evidence that the politically correct and deliberately miseducated FBI completely dropped the ball on this case. “Suspect in Boston Bombing Talked Jihad in Russia,” by Ellen Barry for the New York Times, May 9 (thanks to Kenneth):
KIZLYAR, Russia “” It’s not every day that a well-dressed American shows up in this town, where shaggy cows meander over deeply rutted roads, so people remember Tamerlan Tsarnaev. Among the things that made the young visitor stand out, two acquaintances recalled on Thursday, was his avid interest in waging jihad.
“He already had jihad views when he came; I think because he was Chechen, he was rooting for his homeland,” Zaur M. Zakaryayev, 29, a member of a Salafi advocacy organization, the Union of the Just, said Thursday. “When he got here he was surprised at the conditions. I think he expected to find a full-fledged war, that one people was fighting with another.”
These new accounts out of Kizlyar, where Mr. Tsarnaev spent time with a cousin who is a prominent Salafi Islamist leader, have begun to flesh out a picture of what he did during his six months in Russia last year.
On Sunday agents from the Federal Security Service, the successor to the Soviet-era K.G.B., interrogated Mr. Tsarnaev’s cousin, who is in police custody, asking if he impressed the young man with “extremist” views, his lawyer said.
But the cousin, Magomed Kartashov, told them it was the other way around. In interviews, several young men here agreed, saying that Mr. Kartashov spent hours trying to stop Mr. Tsarnaev from “going to the forest,” or joining one of the militant cells scattered throughout the volatile region, locked in low-level guerrilla warfare with the police.
“Magomed explained to him at length that violent methods are not right,” Mr. Zakaryayev said.
Russian investigators have been eyeing the possibility that Mr. Tsarnaev may have engaged in discussions as early as 2011 over serving as a courier for underground groups in Russia, according to a Russian law enforcement official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. But it appears those discussions were curtailed, perhaps because his contacts were killed during his visit.
In 2011, based on an intercepted phone call between Zubeidat Tsarnaev and an unidentified person, Russia’s Federal Security Service cautioned the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. that he had “changed drastically” and that he was headed to Russia to connect with militants.
Mr. Tsarnaev’s friends in Kizlyar may be responsible for a crucial change in his thinking. When he left, he was no longer focused on the local grievances that fueled the fighting against the police “” but instead broader issues in the Islamic world, including the effect of United States and Russian policy in the Middle East.
Rasim B. Ibadamov said that by last summer, Mr. Tsarnaev was taking steps that suggested he had let go of the idea of joining the underground “” for instance, applying to renew his Russian passport. “What I can say is there was the impression that Tamerlan listened to Magomed and to some extent, he changed,” Mr. Ibadamov said. “His behavior changed. He started to read more, and to read different books. In general, as far as I understand, he changed his views.”…