FBI Faces Questions About Handling of Bomber

The scene of the blasts has been cleaned and handed back to the city

US security officials are to face questions in Congress over whether they mishandled information about Boston bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev. They will brief the Senate Intelligence Committee in a closed hearing, after some US lawmakers accused the FBI of failing to act on Russian concerns.

Tsarnaev was questioned in 2011 amid claims he had adopted radical Islam. He was killed in a manhunt after the attack but his wounded brother Dzhokhar has been charged with the bombings.
Federal prosecutors have charged him with using a weapon of mass destruction and malicious destruction of property resulting in death. He could be sentenced to death if convicted on either count.

Anonymous officials have told US media that 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev said he and his brother had planned the attack themselves without help from foreign militants. The officials say his written answers from his hospital bed to investigators' questions lead them to believe that the pair were motivated by jihadist ideology and that they devised the bombings using the internet.

QUESTIONS THAT WILL BE PUT TO THE FBI

• Why was no further action taken after the 2011 investigation of Tamerlan Tsarnaev?
• Why was he not identified as a threat based on links to radical websites?
• Why were the authorities unaware of his visit to Russia in 2012?

Members of Congress want to know why no further action was taken after Tamerlan Tsarnaev was investigated in 2011 at the request of the Russian government. Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein, who chairs the intelligence committee, said that she and her colleagues would have to "sort it out" when they met FBI officials later on Tuesday. The full Senate is expected to receive a briefing later in the week.

The FBI has defended itself, saying in a statement on Friday that it had run checks on the suspect but found no evidence of terrorist activity. A request to Russia for further information to justify more rigorous checks went unanswered, and an interview by agents with Tsarnaev and his family also revealed nothing suspicious.

But Republican Senator Lindsey Graham questioned why the FBI was unable to identify him as a threat based on his alleged links to radical websites. He called for better co-operation with Russia and the amendment of privacy laws to allow closer scrutiny of suspects' internet activity.

Senator Graham added that the US authorities did not know Tsarnaev had gone to Russia in 2012 because his name was misspelled in travel documents. He spent six months in Dagestan, another mainly Muslim Russian republic bordering Chechnya. During the visit, he also reportedly spent two days in Chechnya itself.

A 10-page criminal complaint was filed against Dzhokhar Tsarnaev on Monday during a court hearing held around his hospital bed. According to a transcript of the hearing, he managed to speak once despite a gunshot wound to his throat sustained during his capture.

Mr Tsarnaev said the word "no" when asked if he could afford a lawyer. Otherwise he nodded in response to Judge Marianne Bowler's questions from his bed at Boston's Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. The next hearing in his case has been scheduled for the end of May.

Perhaps this whole tragedy could have been averted but for one small detail....Tsarnaev's name was misspelled on travel documents and so the authorities did not know that he was out of the country for six months being indoctrinated with jihadist ideology and zeal. Many historical events and even a few wars have hinged upon such small misunderstandings. The most sophisticated computers in the world are no help if a clerk or secretary, somewhere, misspells a name.

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On Tuesday, Boston Mayor Thomas Menino announced that a compensation fund for victims of the attack had received $20m (£13.2m) in the week since it was launched, with donations streaming in from Boston and across the world.