As authorities continued to piece together the backgrounds of the two Boston Marathon bombing suspects Monday, new developments in the case shed more light on how the Tsnarnaev brothers may have become radicalized.

Investigators as well as key congressional leaders are taking a harder look at Zubeidat Tsarnaeva, the mother of the two suspects. On Sunday, Rep. Michael McCaul, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, said the mother had a “very strong role” in radicalizing her sons. “I believe she is a person of interest, if not a subject,” he told Fox News. “I do believe if she comes into the United States she will be detained for questioning.”
“Misha,” dubbed by an uncle of Boston bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev as a major radicalizing influence on his nephew, told The New York Review of Books Sunday that he was not Tamerlan’s Islamic teacher, had no connection to the bomb plot and hadn’t seen him in three years. Misha’s real name is Mikhail Allakhverdov and he lives in a lower middle-class neighborhood in Rhode Island.
The FBI is currently investigating links to possible trainers as well as determining if the Tsarnaevs had help prior to the Boston bombing. Investigators believe the toy controllers that were used to create a remote detonator for the bombs were more sophisticated than what was laid out in the al-Qaida instruction manual.
Rep. Peter King, a member of the House Homeland Security Committee, said Monday the FBI would have carried out a much more intense investigation of the two brothers now suspected in the Boston Marathon bombings if the Russians had informed Washington of “the mother’s radicalization” and “the son’s radicalization.”
Former CIA Director Michael Hayden said on CNN’s “Fareed Zakaria GPS” broadcast that he was surprised Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was read his rights “so quickly,” and “the people doing the interrogation were surprised as well.”
In photos of her as a younger woman, Zubeidat Tsarnaeva wears a low-cut blouse and has her hair teased like a 1980s rock star. After she arrived in the United States from Russia in 2002, she went to beauty school and did facials at a suburban day spa.
But in recent years, people noticed a change. She began wearing a hijab and cited conspiracy theories about 9/11 being a plot against Muslims.

Now known as the angry and grieving mother of the suspects, Tsarnaeva is drawing increased attention after federal officials say Russian authorities intercepted her phone calls, including one in which she vaguely discussed jihad with her elder son. In another, she was recorded talking to someone in southern Russia who is under FBI investigation in an unrelated case, U.S. officials said.

Tsarnaeva insists there is no mystery. She’s no terrorist, just someone who found a deeper spirituality. She insists her sons — Tamerlan, who was killed in a gunfight with police, and Dzhokhar, who was wounded and captured — are innocent.

“It’s all lies and hypocrisy,” she told The Associated Press in Dagestan. “I’m sick and tired of all this nonsense that they make up about me and my children. People know me as a regular person, and I’ve never been mixed up in any criminal intentions, especially any linked to terrorism.”

 More from The Associated Press

Posted by The NON-Conformist