There have been several new developments today in the Boston bombings case.
Authorities are searching a landfill for a laptop believed to be tied to the Boston Marathon bombers, according to CNN.
Information from Dzhokhar Tsarnaev himself, plus other leads, spurred authorities to look through the New Bedford, Massachusetts, landfill, the official told CNN’s Susan Candiotti. The 19-year-old went to school — at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth — in an adjacent town, and he was spotted in his dorm room there in the days after the April 15 twin blasts that left three dead.
ABC News also has more on this development.
The lead regarding the laptop resulted from interviews authorities conducted with acquaintances of the suspects.
From the same ABC News report, we learn that the two acquaintances, who are from Kazakhstan, have been arrested by immigration officers on a violation of their student visas.
Immigration officers arrested the two men, Dias Kadyrbayev, 19, and Azamat Tazhayakov, 20, on Saturday on suspicion that they had violated the terms of their student visas because they were no longer attending classes. They are being detained on the administrative charges at the Suffolk County (Mass.) House of Corrections.The men lived in an apartment near the campus of University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, where accused bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, had been enrolled as a student. Both Tsarnaev brothers were believed to have visited the New Bedford apartment of Kadyrbayev and Tazhayakov after the bombing, according to three law enforcement sources, who spoke on the condition they not be named because they were discussing an ongoing investigation. The police sources told ABC News they traced calls and Russian language text messages from one of the bombing suspect’s cell phone to the Kazakhstani men.
The father of one of the young men maintained that the two “knew Tsarnaev and hang around together sometimes,” and that they “were questioned only as witnesses.”
Lastly, Zubeidat Tsarnaeva, the mother of the bombing suspects, had also been added to a federal terrorism database about 18 months before the attack, according to the Associated Press.
Two government officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the investigation, said the CIA had Zubeidat Tsarnaeva’s name added to the terror database along with that of her son Tamerlan Tsarnaev after Russia contacted the agency in 2011 with concerns that the two were religious militants.About six months earlier, the FBI investigated mother and son, also at Russia’s request, one of the officials said. The FBI found no ties to terrorism. Previously U.S. officials had said only that the FBI investigated Tamerlan.In an interview from Russia, Tsarnaeva said Friday that she has never been linked to terrorism.”It’s all lies and hypocrisy,” she told The Associated Press from 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.”
Legal Insurrection will try to provide additional updates as new information becomes available.
CLICK HERE FOR FULL VERSION OF THIS STORY