WASHINGTON, April 15 (RIA Novosti) – The FBI has a lot to hide about last year’s Boston Marathon bombing, according to Russ Baker, a US investigative journalist and founder of the non-profit website WhoWhatWhy.com.
“The FBI has a lot to hide. In this case, there are indications that it was in close contact with the Tsarnaevs prior to the bombing. Whether the Bureau tried or even succeeded in turning the family into informants is something that is essential to uncover,” Baker told RIA Novosti on Tuesday.
The journalist said there was a huge gap between the bureau’s “elaborately crafted public image” and the reality of being capable of “quasi-criminal behavior” and incompetence. In the case of the Boston bombing, the FBI could have seen the Tsarnaevs’ alleged friend Ibragim Todashev as someone who knew too much, Baker said.
“The FBI clearly has made no serious effort to explain the exact conditions that led to his death,” Baker said. Todashev was killed last May by an FBI agent who interrogated him in his Orlando home. It was later disclosed the 27-year-old had been fired at seven times, despite being unarmed.
Baker told RIA Novosti there were too many gray areas in the investigation. “We still don’t know what evidence the government actually has about the involvement of the Tsarnaev brothers in the bombing or the killing of the MIT police officer.”
The mysterious death of MIT Officer Sean Collier, allegedly at the hand of the brothers, is riddled with inconsistencies. Collier was shot dead on April 18 as he sat in a parked MIT cruiser.
“There’s no logical reason that the brothers would have been in that particular spot at that time when Collier was killed. And they did not even take his gun. It almost seems as if someone else killed Collier as part of an effort to implicate the brothers as killers,” Baker said.
The FBI has yet to confirm the identity of a man nicknamed Danny, who is claimed to be the only person Tamerlan Tsarnaev told about the marathon bombing. Danny, a Chinese national and entrepreneur, said the brothers had carjacked him three days after the bombing, pouring out their soul about how they hated Americans, investigators allege.
In March, a report released by the US Congress revealed that Russia had warned Washington about alleged Boston marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev, saying he had been radicalized. The US placed an alert on Tsarnaev's name in case he tried to board an international flight, but a spelling mistake prevented Tsarnaev from facing additional screening.
Tamerlan Tsarnaev was killed in a gunfight with police in the days following the bomb attack. His younger brother, Dzhokhar, tried to flee the city, but was wounded and later arrested and is now awaiting trial in federal court, scheduled to begin in November.
