RT: March 29, 2014

Tamerlan Tsarnaev, one of the suspected bombers behind the Boston Marathon bombing last year, was approached by the FBI because of his extremist views and asked to work as an informant, according to court records filed by Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s defense team.

Attorneys for the younger Tsarnaev are expected to claim that he was under the influence of the dominating Tamerlan, 26, who was killed during a shootout with police days after the bombing killed three people and injured over 260 others on April 15.

In a 23-page court filing Dzhokhar’s defense team asked the court to force the prosecution to hand over more evidence in the case that would be useful to their argument. Included in the document was the assertion that the FBI, aware of Tamerlan’s radical Islamist views, asked him to work as an informant on certain factions in the Boston region.

The court request said “the FBI made more than one visit to talk with Anzor, Zubeidat [Dzhokhar and Tamerlan’s parents] and Tamerlan, question Tamerlan about his internet searches, and asked him to be an informant, reporting on the Chechen and Muslim community,” as quoted by WBUR Boston.

The defense speculated that Tamerlan may have misinterpreted the intention of the conversations, which may have acted as a “stressor that increased his paranoia and distress.” They specifically note that the interviews should not be interpreted as a motivation for the attack, only that they represent “an important part of the story of Tamerlan’s decline.”

“The underlying data concerning the brothers’ activities, state of mind, and respective trajectories is critical,” attorneys wrote, as quoted by the Boston Globe, adding that evidence “shows Tamerlan to have had a substantially longer and deeper engagement than his younger brother with extremist and violent ideology is mitigating for the light that it sheds on their relative culpability.”

(Read the full article at RT)

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