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F.B.I. Releases Images of Two Suspects in Boston Attack F.B.I. Posts Images of Pair Suspected in Boston Attack
(about 3 hours later)
BOSTON — The F.B.I. on Thursday released still and video images of two suspects in the Boston Marathon bombings — including a man who was seen setting down a backpack at the site of the second blast — and appealed for the public’s help identifying the men. BOSTON — In a direct appeal for help from the public, the F.B.I. on Thursday released pictures and video of two young men who officials believe may be responsible for the explosions that killed three people and injured more than 170 during the Boston Marathon.
One was seen placing a dark-colored backpack outside the Forum restaurant, the site of the second bombing, just minutes before the explosion, said Richard DesLauriers, the special agent in charge of the F.B.I.'s Boston field office. Officials said they have images of one of the men putting a black backpack on the ground just minutes before two near-simultaneous blasts went off close to the finish line of the marathon at 2:50 p.m. on Monday. One video, which officials said they did not release, shows the two men walking slowly away after a bomb exploded while the crowd fled.
“Today we are enlisting the public’s help to identify the two suspects,” Mr. DesLauriers said at a news conference on Thursday evening in Boston. At a news briefing here, Richard DesLauriers, the special agent in charge of the F.B.I.’s Boston field office, initiated the unprecedented crowd-sourcing manhunt by urging the public to look at the pictures and video on the F.B.I.’s Web site. The two men appear to be in their 20s, but Mr. DesLauriers did not characterize their appearance or offer an opinion as to their possible ethnicity or national origin.
In the video, both men are carrying backpacks, and wearing baseball caps, one a dark cap and one a white cap turned backward. They are walking along Boylston Street. A thin crowd could be seen watching the marathon runners, and the generally festive mood all around them was evident when a spectator in a bright blue jacket, holding several yellow balloons, walked in front of the two men. “Somebody out there knows these individuals as friends, neighbors, co-workers, or family members of the suspects,” Mr. DesLauriers said firmly and grimly into the cameras. “Though it may be difficult, the nation is counting on those with information to come forward and provide it to us.”
The images were located as investigators spent hours since Monday afternoon’s attack poring over surveillance videos from stores near the scenes of the two deadly blasts, as well as footage take on smartphones and by television crews filming the Boston Marathon. “Within the last day or so, through that careful process, we initially developed a single person of interest,” Mr. DesLauriers said. “Not knowing if the individual was acting alone or in concert with others, we obviously worked with extreme purpose to make that determination.” Almost immediately, calls started flooding the bureau’s office complex in Clarksburg, W. Va. Traffic to the F.B.I.’s Web site, fbi.gov, spiked to the highest levels it has ever received, an official said. For a brief time, the Web site was offline.
After a concerted effort, he said, investigators determined that a second suspect had been involved. Typically, about two dozen analysts sitting in cubicles there answer calls 24 hours a day, seven days a week. But in the days after Monday’s attacks, the center was inundated with calls and it has since increased the numbers of analysts and agents, according to a law enforcement official.
Both men appeared to be wearing dark-colored zippered-front jackets. The first, whom Mr. DesLauriers called Suspect 1, wore a dark-colored baseball cap with a white emblem on it and markings on the front, a white T-shirt and tan pants. Visible around the edges of his cap was short dark hair. The man he identified as Suspect 2 wore a white baseball cap backward, with dark-colored pants. He had slightly longer curly hair. The men appeared to be wearing hooded sweatshirts beneath the jackets. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. and Director Robert S. Mueller III of the F.B.I. were directly involved in the decision to release the photos, a senior law enforcement official said.
Mr. DesLauriers did not characterize the appearance of the men or offer an opinion as to their possible ethnicity or national origin. Michael R. Bouchard, a former assistant director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, said that in releasing the photographs and video, the authorities took a calculated risk.
Mr. DesLauriers urged anyone who has seen the men, or who knows who they are, to call 1-800-CALL-FBI (1-800-225-5324). “If you don’t release the photos, the bad guys don’t know you’re on to them while you’re looking,” said Mr. Bouchard, who helped oversee the Washington-area sniper case in 2002 and now runs his own security firm in Vienna, Va. “If you do release them, you run the risk they see them and change their appearance or go underground. They made a calculated decision the benefits of releasing the photos outweighed the risks of holding back and trying to identify them themselves.”
Earlier Thursday, President Obama flew to Boston and told a service mourning victims of the bombings that “the spirit of this city is undaunted, and the spirit of this country shall remain undimmed.” Mr. Bouchard said several characteristics in the images selected for release are distinctive: the emblem on one man’s hat, the backpacks they carried, their gaits, and seeing the two men walking together.
“Every one of us has been touched by this attack on your beloved city, every one of us stands with you,” Mr. Obama said in emotional remarks at an interfaith service in Boston’s Cathedral of the Holy Cross, where he mourned those who died, spoke in often personal terms about the city of Boston and ended with a rousing look forward to next year’s Boston Marathon. “They don’t know if these guys are from out of town, so they had to cast their net wider,” said Mr. Bouchard, who said the widespread use of social media and cellphones make such identifications easier than just a few years ago. “Now the public becomes a force multiplier.”
As the president sought to console a shaken Boston, and a shaken nation, investigators continued to try to find out who was behind the attacks. In the Washington sniper case, he said, the culprits’ car was spotted by a truck driver less than eight hours after photographs were made public.
In Washington, Janet Napolitano, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, addressed the attacks, telling a Congressional committee that the authorities are seeking to speak with “individuals” spotted in video footage. At the briefing, Mr. DesLauriers did not specify what led the F.B.I. to call the two men suspects, but the official said that the decision was “based on what they do in the rest of the video.”
“We have been collecting video from a variety of sources, as you might imagine, at the finish line of the Boston Marathon,” she said. “There’s lots and lots of video. There is some video that has raised the question of those that the F.B.I. would like to speak with.” “We have a lot more video than what we released,” the official said. “The sole purpose of what we released was to show the public what they looked like. The other videos show other things.”
The interfaith service that Mr. Obama spoke at, “Healing Our City,” brought together Christian, Muslim and Jewish religious leaders, as well as prominent state and local leaders. Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts and Mr. Obama’s rival in last year’s presidential election, was among the dignitaries as the service. The fact that F.B.I. officials chose to make the video images public suggested to some people familiar with law enforcement tactics that they have not been able to match them with faces in government photo databases, said Jim Albers, senior vice president at MorphoTrust USA, which supplies facial recognition technology to the United States. The F.B.I. has a collection of mug shots of more than 12 million people, mostly arrest photos.
Boston’s long-serving mayor, Thomas M. Menino, who recently announced that he would not seek a sixth term, got out of the wheelchair he has been using because of a broken leg and stood at the lectern to proclaim, “We are one Boston,” adding that he had never loved the city’s people more. And Gov. Deval L. Patrick of Massachusetts said that “we will have accountability without vengeance, vigilance without fear.” “The only conclusion you can reach is that they don’t have a match they have confidence in,” Mr. Albers said.
Consoling a shaken public has become one of the jobs of American presidents in recent years, from the eulogy President Bill Clinton delivered at the Oklahoma City State Fair Arena after the deadly bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building there in 1995 to President George W. Bush’s trip to see the rescue workers at the smoldering ruins of the World Trade Center a few days after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, to the eulogies that President Obama has delivered after mass shootings in Tucson and, just months ago, Newtown, Conn. That could be a question of the quality of the images of the two suspects — the video clips posted by the bureau do not include high-resolution frontal images of the two men’s faces, as would be ideal for facial recognition software, Mr. Albers said. Or it may be that the search software, which produces a list of matches ranked by probability, simply did not find a persuasive match.
At a Senate hearing Thursday morning, the nation’s top intelligence official, James R. Clapper Jr., echoed President Obama’s comments earlier this week that the authorities still do not know whether the attack was a foreign or domestic plot, carried out by one or more individuals or a group. The pictures made public Thursday are “a digital wanted poster,” an update of the traditional tool used at post offices for decades, Mr. Albers said. “Cops have been using facial recognition since there have been cops. They just didn’t have technology to help them.”
In a brief interview after the hearing, Mr. Clapper, the director of national intelligence, said all of the nation’s 16 intelligence agencies are supporting the F.B.I.-led investigation, with personnel as well as analytical and technical know-how. “We will bring all the resources that they need,” said Mr. Clapper, who declined to provide details. The authorities here have had good luck in the past by releasing pictures to the public, having done the same thing two years ago as they hunted for James (Whitey) Bulger, a local mob boss who had been on the run for 16 years. Shortly thereafter, they found him.
In Boston, Mr. Obama spoke in personal terms about the victims of the bombing and offered prayers for their families. Krystle Campbell, 29, of Medford, Mass., was “always smiling,” he said, noting that her parents were at the service. He said that his prayers were with the family of Lu Lingzi, 23, in China, who had sent her to graduate school at Boston University “so that she could experience all that this city has to offer.” And he spoke about what he called the heartbreaking death Martin Richard, 8, of Dorchester, who was killed in the blast, which also wounded his mother and sister. The briefing Thursday took place a few hours after President Obama spoke at an interfaith service of healing at Boston’s Cathedral of the Holy Cross. Almost 1,800 people packed the pews and hundreds more outside listened intently as his words were broadcast into the morning sun.
“His last hours were as perfect as an 8-year-old boy could hope for: with his family, eating ice cream at a sporting event,'’ the president said. His theme was the marathon, both as road race and metaphor, and he began his remarks with the same phrase that he used to end them: “Scripture tells us to run with endurance the race that is set before us.”

Katharine Q. Seelye reported from Boston, and Michael Cooper from New York. Reporting was contributed by John Eligon, Richard A. Oppel Jr. and Jess Bidgood from Boston; William K. Rashbaum from New York; and Scott Shane, Michael S. Schmidt and Eric Schmitt from Washington.

He mourned the dead and assured the maimed that they were not alone.
“We will all be with you as you learn to stand and walk and, yes, run again,” he said. “Of that, I have no doubt. You will run again.”
He spoke in personal terms. With a nod to his years as a student at Harvard Law School and to his speech at the 2004 Democratic convention here when he burst on the national political stage, he embraced this heartbroken city as his own.
And whoever the perpetrators may be, Mr. Obama dismissed them as “small, stunted individuals who would destroy instead of build.”
But mostly he rallied the living as he reflected this city’s determined spirit.
“Like Bill Iffrig, 78 years old — the runner in the orange tank top who we all saw get knocked down by the blast — we may be momentarily knocked off our feet, but we’ll pick ourselves up,” the president said. “We’ll keep going. We will finish the race.”
If the perpetrators sought to intimidate or terrorize Boston, he said, “well, it should be pretty clear by now that they picked the wrong city to do it.” The crowd cheered as if at a sports arena. “Not here in Boston.”
As the president sought to console the city, one law enforcement official said that the suspects in the photographs captured the interest of the authorities because of their bags: crime scene investigators recovered portions of a shredded black backpack that they believe carried explosives, this official said, and they were able to determine the brand and model of the bag. The backpack carried by at least one of the men in the videos appeared to be a match, the person said.
The interfaith service where Mr. Obama spoke, “Healing Our City,” brought together Christian, Muslim and Jewish religious leaders, as well as prominent state and local leaders. Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts and Mr. Obama’s rival in last year’s presidential election, was among the dignitaries at the service.
Boston’s long-serving mayor, Thomas M. Menino, who recently announced that he would not seek a sixth term, rose from the wheelchair he has been using since he broke his leg last week and stood at the lectern to proclaim, “We are one Boston.” He said he had never loved the people of his city more.
“And yes, we even love New York City more,” he said to chuckles from the pews as he thanked Boston’s rivals for playing “Sweet Caroline,” an unofficial Boston anthem, at Yankee Stadium.
Gov. Deval Patrick praised the city for its resilience and its compassion. “In a dark hour,” he said, “so many of you showed so many of us that darkness cannot drive out darkness, as Dr. King said; only light can do that.”
After the service, Pauline M. DiCesare, 76, of Wayland, Mass., who grew up in Boston, remained in her pew.
“It was very uplifting, something we all need,” she said, as her voice cracked with emotion. “It’s just the events of life. You’re down and you get up again and life goes on, one step after another. Like the president said, the sun will rise tomorrow.”
Outside the Gothic cathedral, Dina Juhasz, a nurse from Natick, Mass., who was at the marathon and helped to treat the wounded, said she appreciated the service.
“It’s way too early for closure,” she said. “It was a moment of acknowledgment to say, this was horrific and we are a community and we’re going to get through this. It’s a beginning.”
Information may be given to the F.B.I. at 1-800-CALL-FBI.

Katharine Q. Seelye reported from Boston, Michael S. Schmidt from Washington, and Michael Cooper from New York. Reporting was contributed by John Eligon, Richard A. Oppel Jr. and Jess Bidgood from Boston; William K. Rashbaum from New York; and Eric Schmitt and Scott Shane from Washington.