In a wild night of developments in the Boston Marathon bombings, one of two suspects is dead after a police shootout that killed a university police officer and prompted a massive manhunt still underway for the second suspect. The two are said to be brothers, believed to either be from Chechnya or to have lived there in the past.
During a car chase, the suspects hurled explosives out a window at police. The continuing search for the second man, described as a dangerous terrorist, has put the entire city of Boston and some of its suburbs on lockdown.
Police are searching for the remaining suspect known as the 'man in the white hat' from Marathon surveillance footage. An FBI bulletin identifies him as nineteen-year-old Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev, of Cambridge, Massachusetts. His brother, Tamerlan, was killed during the earlier shootout. The at-large brother dropped the bombs at the race finish lane, Boston Police Commissioner Edward Davis said.
Connecticut State Police believed that the suspect may have been driving a gray Honda CRV with the Massachusetts plate 316 ES9, and later said that that vehicle was recovered in Boston. It was unoccupied, Boston police said. An area near an apartment attached to a restaurant in Watertown is now surrounded by police, but it is not clear why.
Authorities in Boston suspended all mass transit and warned close to a million people in the entire city and some of its suburbs to stay indoors as the hunt went on. Businesses were asked not to open. People waiting at bus and subway stops were told to go home.
"All of Boston," should shelter-in-place, Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick said at a news conference. "This is a serious situation," he said. "We're asking the public to take it seriously as well, and assist law enforcement by following those simple instructions. We believe this to be a terrorist," he said of the suspect on the loose. "We believe this to be a man who's come here to kill people. We need to get him in custody."
From Watertown to Cambridge, police surrounded various buildings as they searched for Suspect Number Two. Around 8:30 am, officers sprinted toward a house in Watertown, and reporters were pushed back more than a block as helicopters buzzed overhead. SWAT teams, FBI agents, and armored vehicles assembled at the scene, as sharpshooters across the street trained their guns at the house. They left the house around 9:30 am, and a few dozen Boston police officers with assault rifles and helmets then filed into the backyard of a red brick building down the street.
Authorities have shed no light on the motive for the attack and have said it is unclear whether it was the work of domestic or international terrorists or someone else entirely with an unknown agenda. The men's uncle, Ruslan Tsarni of Montgomery Village, Maryland, told The Associated Press that the men traveled here together from a Russian region near Chechnya. The news organization also spoke with their father, Anzor Tsarnaev, in a telephone interview from the Russian city of Makhachkala. The father said that his younger son, Dzhokhar, is "a true angel. Dzhokhar is a second-year medical student in the U.S. He is such an intelligent boy. We expected him to come on holidays here," the father said.
The White House said President Barack Obama was being briefed on developments overnight by Lisa Monaco, his assistant for homeland security and counterterrorism.
The images released by the FBI depict the two young men walking, one behind the other, near the finish line. Richard DesLauriers, the FBI agent in charge in Boston, said Suspect Number Two, in the white hat, was seen setting down a bag at the site of the second of two deadly explosions.
Authorities said surveillance tape showed Suspect Number Two during a robbery of a convenience store in Cambridge, near the campus of MIT, where a university police officer was shot to death while responding to a report of a disturbance, said State Police Colonel Timothy Alben. The officer was identified as 26-year-old Sean Collier.
From there, authorities said, the two men carjacked a man in a Mercedes-Benz, keeping him with them in the car for half an hour before releasing him at a gas station in Cambridge. The man was not injured.
The search for the vehicle led to a chase that ended in Watertown, where authorities said the suspects threw explosive devices from the car and exchanged gunfire with police. A transit police officer was seriously injured during the chase, authorities said.
In Watertown, witnesses reported hearing multiple gunshots and explosions at about 1 am. Dozens of police officers and FBI agents were in the neighborhood and a helicopter circled overhead.
Watertown resident Christine Yajko said she was awakened at about 1:30 am by a loud noise, began to walk to her kitchen and heard gunfire. "I heard the explosion, so I stepped back from that area, then I went back out and heard a second one," she said. "It was very loud. It shook the house a little." She said a police officer later knocked on her door and told her there was an undetonated improvised explosive device in the street and warned her to stay away from the windows. "It was on the street, right near our kitchen window," she said.
Massachusetts State Police spokesman David Procopio said: "The incident in Watertown did involve what we believe to be explosive devices possibly, potentially, being used against the police officers."
Boston cab driver Imran Saif said he was standing on a street corner at a police barricade across from a diner when he heard an explosion. "I heard a loud boom, and then a rapid succession of pop, pop, pop," he said. "It sounded like automatic weapons. And then I heard the second explosion." He said he could smell something burning and advanced to check it out but area residents at their windows yelled at him: "Hey, it's gunfire! Don't go that way!"
Doctors at a Boston hospital where Suspect Number One died said they treated a man with a possible blast injury and multiple gunshot wounds.
In the past, insurgents from Chechnya and neighboring restive provinces in the Caucasus have been involved in terror attacks in Moscow and other places in Russia.
Those raids included one in Moscow in October of 2002, in which a group of Chechen militants took eight hundred people hostage and held them for two days before special forces stormed the building, killing all forty Chechen hostage-takers. Also killed were 129 hostages, mostly from effects of the narcotic gas Russian forces used to subdue the attackers.
Chechen insurgents also launched a 2004 hostage-taking raid in the southern Russian town of Beslan, where they took hundreds of hostages. The siege ended in a bloodbath two days later, with more than 330 people, about half of them children, killed.
Insurgents from Chechnya and other regions also have launched a long series of bombings in Moscow and other cities in Russia. An explosion at the international arrivals hall at Moscow's Domodedovo airport in January of 2011 killed at least thirty people and wounded more than a hundred and forty.
Rico says he's not sure why the Chechens decided the Marathon was a good target for their political aspirations, but it's not gonna help... (And they're definitely slipping; they kill Russians by the score but only got three Bostonians.)
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