BOSTON — Two onetime classmates of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the surviving suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings, were charged on Wednesday with conspiring to obstruct justice and destroy evidence, accused of taking a laptop computer and a backpack containing fireworks belonging to Mr. Tsarnaev. | They were perhaps Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s closest friends during his two years at college, an American classmate from high school and two Russian-speaking students from Kazakhstan. The Kazakhs seemingly had money and drove expensive cars. They entertained Mr. Tsarnaev at their off-campus apartment, and he partied with them in New York. One of them lent Mr. Tsarnaev a black BMW after he smashed his Honda Civic in an accident. |
The men, Dias Kadyrbayev, 19, and Azamat Tazhayakov, 19, both citizens of Kazakhstan who are in the United States on student visas, appeared in court Wednesday afternoon after having been arrested earlier in the day. | And in the wake of the twin bombs that exploded last month at the finish line of the Boston Marathon, federal prosecutors now say, the three showed just how close their friendship was: two of them decided to put a backpack and fireworks linking Mr. Tsarnaev to the blasts into a black trash bag, and toss it into a Dumpster. Prosecutors say the third later lied to investigators when asked about it. |
A third man, Robel Phillipos, 19, of Cambridge, Mass., was charged with lying to federal law enforcement officials about what they said was his role in disposing of the material. | The two Kazakhs, Dias Kadyrbayev and Azamat Tazhayakov, were charged on Wednesday with destroying evidence to obstruct the federal inquiry into the marathon bombing. Their American friend, Robel K. Phillipos, was charged with lying to impede the investigation. |
Mr. Phillipos hung his head in court, prompting Magistrate Judge, Marianne B. Bowler, to instruct him as she read him his rights: “I suggest you pay attention to me rather than looking down.” | The story behind their arrest, detailed in lengthy affidavits, paints a vivid portrait of Mr. Tsarnaev in the days after the bombing, and portrays a dorm-room scene of confusion as the three young men, stunned to realize that their friend was being sought as a terrorist, debated whether and how to help him. |
All three suspects appeared in court in bluejeans. They were handcuffed and shackled at the ankles. They were taken into federal custody until their next court appearance. | And it chillingly laid bare the skill with which Mr. Tsarnaev appears to have concealed plans for the bombing from even his most intimate associates. Three days after the blasts, as photographs of the then unidentified bombing suspects blanketed television and the Internet, Mr. Kadyrbayev sent Mr. Tsarnaev a text message: one of the photographs, he wrote, bore a marked resemblance to him. |
Lawyers for the three men said outside the courthouse that their clients had had nothing to do with the bombings and had cooperated fully with the investigation. | “lol,” Mr. Tsarnaev coolly replied. “you better not text me.” |
“My client had no knowledge of the incident,” said Robert Stahl, who is representing Mr. Kadyrbayev, adding later, “He absolutely denies the charges, as we’ve said from the beginning.” He said his client was “shocked and horrified” by the bombings | He added: “come to my room and take whatever you want.” |
Mr. Stahl did not deny that his client had taken a backpack with powder in it belonging to Mr. Tsarnaev, but said that his client had told the Federal Bureau of Investigation about it. “He didn’t know the items were involved in the bombing,” Mr. Stahl said. | Mr. Kadyrbayev told federal authorities he thought the request was a joke. Only later that evening, he told interrogators, would he come to see it as a thinly veiled plea to cover up his crime. |
Mr. Tazhayakov and Mr. Kadyrbayev have been in federal custody for more than a week on allegations they violated their student visas. Mr. Stahl said that Mr. Kadyrbayev was a sophomore engineering major and was in “technical violation of student visa for not regularly attending classes.” | Should the three men be found guilty, they would face potentially stiff penalties: up to five years in prison for the two Kazakhs, eight years for Mr. Phillipos, and up to $250,000 fines for each of the three. Mr. Kadyrbayev, 19, and Mr. Tazhayakov, 20, have been held in jail since last week, ostensibly on suspicion of violating their student visas by not attending class at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, where they had studied with Mr. Tsarnaev. |
Harlan Protass, a lawyer representing Mr. Tazhayakov, said his client “feels horrible and was shocked to hear that someone he knew was involved with the marathon bombing. He has cooperated fully with the authorities and looks forward to the truth coming out in this case. He considers it an honor to be able to study in the united states.” | All four men entered classes there in the fall of 2011, but Mr. Phillipos dropped out and returned to Cambridge, where he and Mr. Tsarnaev had attended Cambridge Ringe and Latin High School together. A university spokesman said that Mr. Kadyrbayev was not currently enrolled, and that Mr. Tazhayakov remained a student but had been suspended until the charges against him are resolved. |
Mr. Kadyrbayev and Mr. Tazhayakov are due back in court on May 14. They face a maximum of five years in prison and $250,000 in fines. | In one respect, the two Kazakh students seem an odd match for Mr. Tsarnaev and Mr. Phillipos. Sent from oil-rich Kazakhstan to study in the United States, Mr. Tazhayakov and Mr. Kadyrbayev appear to have come from wealthy families. Mr. Kadyrbayev’s Facebook page features photographs of him on beaches in Fort Lauderdale and Dubai. Mr. Tazhayakov’s page indicates he comes from Atyrau, a petroleum center at the mouth of the Ural River. By contrast, the Cambridge homes of both Mr. Tsarnaev and Mr. Phillipos are hard-worn apartment houses in working-class neighborhoods. |
Derege M. Demissie, the lawyer representing Mr. Phillipos, who was arrested Wednesday and charged separately with making false statements, said that his client was innocent and that the details would come out in court. He is due back in court on Monday and faces a maximum sentence of 8 years and a $250,000 fine. | But the four quickly became close after starting classes, the affidavit and interviews with friends suggest, in part because Mr. Tsarnaev and the two Kazakh students all spoke fluent Russian. Mr. Tazhayakov struck up a friendship with Mr. Tsarnaev first, and appeared the closest to him, said Jason Rowe, a sophomore who was Mr. Tsarnaev’s freshman dorm roommate. |
Two explosives detonated April 15 near the finish line of the marathon, killing three people and injuring more than 260 others. | A Cambridge friend of Mr. Tsarnaev said their friendship began to ebb after Mr. Tsarnaev met the two Kazakhs. Photographs posted online suggest a deepening relationship with the foreign students; in one undated shot, Mr. Tsarnaev drapes an arm over a broadly smiling Mr. Kadyrbayev as the two sit at a kitchen table, plates of food laid out before them. Despite dropping out of school and returning to Cambridge, Mr. Phillipos also appears to have become fast friends with the Kazakh students, visiting them frequently in the apartment they shared in New Bedford, about three miles from the Dartmouth campus. |
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, and his brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, are suspected of having set off the bombs. Tamerlan, 26, was killed in a shootout with the police, while Dzhokhar was charged with using a weapon of mass destruction. | And Mr. Kadyrbayev and Mr. Tazhayakov apparently traveled often to Cambridge, Mr. Kadyrbayev to meet “repeatedly” with the Tsarnaev family, the criminal complaint against him states. |
He was transferred last week from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, where he was being treated for multiple gunshot wounds, to a locked medical facility for male prisoners at Fort Devens. | By last year, Mr. Tsarnaev and the two Kazakhs appear to have become constant companions. A 2012 photograph, possibly from last November, shows the three posing in Times Square, bundled against the cold, the Kazakh students grinning broadly. “New York is so ratchet on black Friday it’s ridiculous,” Mr. Tsarnaev wrote on Twitter that month. “I’m on to bed son.” |
The three men charged on Wednesday began attending the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth in 2011, at the same time as Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. Mr. Tsarnaev became particularly close to Mr. Kadyrbayev and Mr. Tazhayakov, who would frequently visit his family members, an affidavit filed in the case said. | That world would rapidly unravel a few months later. |
Mr. Kadyrbayev told the authorities that he suspected that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev had been involved in the marathon bombings when he went to his friend’s dorm room with the others three days after the attacks and noticed that several tubes that had previously contained fireworks had been emptied of their powder. | An F.B.I. affidavit supporting the charges against the three men does not detail their reactions to the bombings in Boston — one of their lawyers said they had been “shocked and horrified” — but it makes clear that for days afterward, they had no inkling that Mr. Tsarnaev might have been involved. |
Mr. Kadyrbayev said he had shown Mr. Tazhayakov, who, along with Mr. Phillipos, was with him at the time, a text message from Dzhokhar saying, “I’m about to leave if you need something in my room take it,” the affidavit said. | On Wednesday, two days after the explosions, Mr. Kadyrbayev drove to Mr. Tsarnaev’s dormitory and, standing outside, chatted while Mr. Tsarnaev smoked a cigarette, the affidavit quotes Mr. Kadyrbayev as saying. Later, Mr. Tsarnaev drove to the New Bedford apartment and stayed until about midnight. |
Asked about the text from Mr. Kadyrbayev’s lawyer, Mr. Stahl said: “There was no signal, it means the plain English meaning.” He did not elaborate. | Only one detail seemed amiss. Mr. Tsarnaev, whose long and unmanageable hair had been an object of wry posts on his Twitter account, had suddenly cut his mop short. |
In the room, they found a backpack containing “an emptied-out cardboard tube” that had previously contained fireworks and a jar of Vaseline that Mr. Kadyrbayev believed had been used “to make bombs,” according to the affidavit, which was sworn out by Special Agent Scott P. Cieplik of the F.B.I. The men then took the backpack, the Vaseline and Mr. Tsarnaev’s laptop to Mr. Phillipos’ apartment. | The next day, Mr. Tazhayakov told the F.B.I., Mr. Tsarnaev drove him home from a university class, dropping him off about 4 p.m. An hour or more later, Mr. Kadyrbayev called Mr. Phillipos as he was driving to the apartment from Boston with an urgent message: turn on the television news when you get home. |
Mr. Kadyrbayev told the authorities, the affidavit said, that after the men saw news reports that Tamerlan Tsarnaev had been killed, he threw the backpack in the garbage “because they did not want Tsarnaev to get into trouble.” The affidavit does not indicate that the laptop was discarded, and two law enforcement officials said the F.B.I. had it in its possession. | Investigators had released grainy photographs of two bombing suspects, lifted from video surveillance cameras. One of the suspects, Mr. Phillipos said, looked familiar. |
Mr. Phillipos, prosecutors say, initially lied to investigators about whether any items had been removed from the dorm room, although he later acknowledged telling Mr. Kadyrbayev to “do what you have to do” in response to a question about what should be done with the backpack. The backpack, according to the affidavit, contained “seven red tubular fireworks, approximately 6 to 8 inches in length.” It also contained a homework assignment sheet from a class in which Mr. Tsarnaev had been enrolled. | The sequence of events that followed, patched together from separate F.B.I. interviews with Mr. Phillipos and the two Kazakhs, is not precisely clear. Sometimes before 7 p.m., the three men drove to Mr. Tsarnaev’s Pine Dale Hall dormitory room. His roommate said Mr. Tsarnaev had left a couple of hours earlier. |
The university said Wednesday that neither Mr. Kadyrbayev nor Mr. Phillipos was currently enrolled there and that Mr. Tazhayakov, who is a current student, had been suspended pending the outcome of the case. | As the visitors watched a movie, the affidavit states, they noticed a backpack stuffed with fireworks that had been emptied of their powder. Mr. Kadyrbayev “knew when he saw the empty fireworks that Tsarnaev was involved in the bombing,” the affidavit states. |
On Tuesday, President Obama offered measured support for the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s handling of a tip from Russian intelligence about Tamerlan Tsarnaev, saying a review would be conducted to determine if more could have been done to prevent the attack. | He resolved to protect him, and at some point in the evening the backpack, fireworks, a jar of Vaseline and Mr. Tsarnaev’s laptop were carried back to the New Bedford apartment. |
“Based on what I’ve seen so far, the F.B.I. performed its duties,” Mr. Obama said at a White House news conference. “Department of Homeland Security did what it was supposed to be doing. But this is hard stuff.” | At 8:43 p.m., Mr. Kadyrbayev sent the text message to Mr. Tsarnaev noting his resemblance to the photographs, and read the nonchalant reply. Mr. Tazhayakov told the F.B.I. that when Mr. Kadyrbayev showed him Mr. Tsarnaev’s request to “take whatever you want,” he concluded that he would never seen his friend again alive. |
The president suggested that the brothers had been “self-radicalized” and were therefore harder to catch than terrorists who are part of a large network. He said Russian officials had been “very cooperative” since the bombings, as American investigators have traveled to Dagestan in southern Russia to try to reconstruct Tamerlan’s activities during a six-month visit last year. | Mr. Phillipos initially told the F.B.I. he did not recall going to Mr. Tsarnaev’s dorm room that night, then said later that they had gone there, but left without entering, the authorities said. Only six days later would he recant,: actually, Mr. Kadyrbayev texted him at 9 p.m. to “go to Jahar’s room,” where the three men took the laptop and evidence. |
Some members of Congress have suggested that the F.B.I. failed to follow up adequately after receiving a warning in March 2011 about Tamerlan Tsarnaev and his mother, Zubeidat, whom Russian intelligence had reportedly overheard talking about jihad on the telephone. The warning, according to the F.B.I., said that Tamerlan was a follower of radical Islam, and that he had changed drastically and planned to travel to Russia to connect with underground groups. | Back home, Mr. Phillipos said, the three “started to freak out, because it became clear from a CNN report that we were watching that Jahar was one of the Boston Marathon bombers.” Mr. Kadyrbayev asked him “if he should get rid of the stuff.” |
Mr. Obama said that after the Russian warning, federal agents “had not only investigated the older brother; they interviewed the older brother. They concluded that there were no signs that he was engaging in extremist activity.” | “Do what you have to do,” he said he told him. |
F.B.I. investigators have continued to focus on Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s widow, Katherine Russell, to see whether she played any role in the attack or in helping him and his brother try to cover up their actions, knowingly or unknowingly. | Shortly thereafter, the bag and the fireworks were tossed into the apartment complex Dumpster. |
After finding traces of female DNA and a fingerprint on bomb remnants, technicians were checking for matches with Ms. Russell and several other people. Ms. Russell’s lawyer said Tuesday that she “will continue to meet with law enforcement, as she has done for many hours over the past week, and provide as much assistance to the investigation as she can.” | The next afternoon, as Mr. Tazhayakov watched, a garbage truck emptied it and drove away. |
But two law enforcement officials said she had stopped cooperating with the authorities in recent days. “Her and her lawyer have now clammed up,” one of the officials said on Tuesday afternoon. | Reporting was contributed by Ian Lovett and Jess Bidgood in Boston; Michael S. Schmidt in Washington; William K. Rashbaum and Serge F. Kovaleski in New York; Kitty Bennett in St. Petersburg, Fla. |
That has heightened the suspicions of investigators, one of the officials said. Meanwhile, the lawyers for Ms. Russell said in a statement that she had been told by officials from the Massachusetts medical examiner’s office that they were prepared to release Mr. Tsarnaev’s remains. The statement said it was Ms. Russell’s “wish that his remains be released to the Tsarnaev family, and we will communicate her wishes to the proper authorities.” | |
“Katherine and her family continue to be deeply saddened by the harm that has been caused,” the statement said. “They mourn for the loss of life and the terrible consequences these events have had for those who have been injured and for their families.” | |
In Russia, officials denied news reports that Tamerlan Tsarnaev had been watched during his visit to Dagestan last year. | |
“Tamerlan Tsarnaev was not under the surveillance of the Center for Combating Extremism, or other police agencies,” said Fatina Ubaidatova, a spokeswoman for Dagestan’s Interior Ministry. “He did not commit any offenses in Dagestan, according to our sources. Police do not intervene in law-abiding citizens’ private lives.” | |
American experts on Russian security measures in Dagestan expressed skepticism about the assertion. Because Mr. Tsarnaev had already been flagged as potentially dangerous, they said it was highly likely that he was watched while in Makhachkala, the regional capital. | |
In an interview with The New York Times on Tuesday, Mr. Tsarnaev’s parents, Zubeidat and Anzor, rejected reports that their son had been seen meeting with militant suspects in Dagestan. The newspaper Novaya Gazeta, citing an unidentified official in the anti-extremism unit of Dagestan’s Interior Ministry, reported that intelligence services had seen Tamerlan meeting with Mahmoud Mansur Nidal, a militant suspect who was killed on May 19 after a standoff with Russian authorities in Makhachkala. | |
“I have never heard this name from the mouth of my son,” Mrs. Tsarnaeva said in a telephone interview. “He never met with any Mahmoud, and I don’t know what all this talk is about.” | |
She said that she was certain that Tamerlan had not connected with underground groups because “he never went out anywhere.” She said he was under scrutiny from his father after he traveled from the United States to join Tamerlan on May 2 — though that was four months after Tamerlan reached Dagestan. | |
“His father says that he protected him as a hen protects its egg,” she said. “He came, and he was a very open boy and very naïve.” | |
Katharine Q. Seelye reported from Boston, Michael S. Schmidt from Washington and William K. Rashbaum from New York. Reporting was contributing by Serge F. Kovaleski and Timothy Williams from New York; Scott Shane from Washington; Ellen Barry from Moscow; and Andrew Roth from Makhachkala, Russia. | |
