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Note by Boston Bombing Suspect Sheds Light on Motive, Officials Say Chechen Refugee Questioned in F.B.I.’s Inquiry of Bombing
(about 11 hours later)
As the police and federal agents pursued him in a Boston suburb four days after the marathon bombings, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev scrawled a note inside the hull of the boat where he was hiding that said the attack was retribution for wars the United States waged in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to two law enforcement officials. MANCHESTER, N.H. — F.B.I. agents investigating the Boston Marathon bombing have repeatedly questioned Musa Khadzhimuratov, a Chechen refugee and former separatist fighter who says he had a passing social relationship with one of the two bombing suspects. They searched his family’s small apartment here on Tuesday, scouring his computers, subjecting him to a polygraph, and taking a DNA sample.
The note stated that if you attack one Muslim, you attack all Muslims, an official said, speaking generally about its content. The hours of F.B.I. questioning in more than a dozen meetings — described by Mr. Khadzhimuratov and his wife, Madina, in an interview — illustrate the bureau’s intensive effort to identify possible accomplices and test its theory that the suspects, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, were radicalized and trained on the Web and acted on their own.
The note, which was first reported by CBS News, could serve as important evidence against Mr. Tsarnaev, the younger brother of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, a onetime boxer who is considered the mastermind behind the bombings. Some of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s friends have said they believed that the older brother, who never assimilated to life in the United States the way Dzhokhar appeared to have done, must have cajoled or brainwashed Dzhokhar into participating in the bombings. But some members and supporters of the small Chechen community in the United States fear that the bureau’s approach may be unduly influenced by Russian authorities who have an interest in using the Boston attack to smear their Chechen adversaries.
Dzhokhar came out of the boat and was captured in Watertown, Mass., on the evening of April 19. Later, in his hospital room, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was questioned extensively by law enforcement officials about whether other potential threats existed, all without having his Miranda rights read to him. But unlike those statements, the note scrawled with a pen inside the boat may constitute a plainly admissible statement of Dzhokhar’s motivation for his alleged participation in the April 15 attack near the finish line of the Boston Marathon. Fatima Tlisova, a reporter for the Voice of America who grew up in the Caucasus and worked there for years as a journalist, said many Chechens in this country were worried.
The portion of the boat’s interior on which Mr. Tsarnaev had written would likely be cut from the hull and presented in court as evidence should he go to trial, said a person with knowledge of the investigation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the case. “They are scared that they could be framed by the Russian F.S.B.,” she said, using the initials for Russia’s Federal Security Service. “Even if they’re completely innocent, they feel very, very vulnerable,” said Ms. Tlisova, who wrote about Mr. Khadzhimuratov this week.
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, has been charged by federal prosecutors with using a weapon of mass destruction and could face the death penalty. Tamerlan Tsarnaev died of wounds suffered early on the morning of April 19, when he was shot by the police and run over by Dzhokhar as he tried to elude the authorities. Mr. Khadzhimuratov, 36, said he understood why investigators would want to take a look at him. Tamerlan Tsarnaev, along with his wife and daughter, stopped by Mr. Khadzhimuratov’s apartment a few weeks before the bombing, the last of several encounters. And long before coming to the United States in 2004, Mr. Khadzhimuratov was a bodyguard for Akhmed Zakayev, a prominent secular Chechen separatist leader who now lives in London.
The two brothers are believed to have carried out the marathon bombings that killed three and wounded more than 260. Mr. Khadzhimuratov said that he was one of six bodyguards for Mr. Zakayev; and that he was shot by Russian security forces in 2001 while trying to evade capture and lost the use of his legs. The other bodyguards, he said, have been killed.
One key question that investigators are still examining is what, if anything, Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s wife, Katherine Russell, knew about the attack. But Mr. Khadzhimuratov said he had been rattled by the growing intensity of the F.B.I. scrutiny, which has upset his wife, 32, and their daughter, 14, and son, 13. He said the visit from Mr. Tsarnaev in March, when they drank tea and talked about family, was like their handful of previous meetings.
The Tsarnaev brothers, a person briefed on the investigation said, could easily have constructed the pressure-cooker bombs and other explosive devices in the apartment shared by Ms. Russell and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, while Ms. Russell was away at her job. “We talked about family, not religion or politics,” he said. He said he had no inkling that Mr. Tsarnaev had driven several times from his home in Cambridge, Mass., to New Hampshire to buy fireworks for the explosive powder used in the bombs or to shoot at a firearms range in Manchester — let alone that he would attack the marathon.
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has told investigators that Ms. Russell was not aware of their intentions before the attack or involved in any way in its planning, the person briefed on the investigation said. “We have nothing to hide,” said Mr. Khadzhimuratov, who has not hired a lawyer. “But they began very nice, saying they needed an expert on the North Caucasus. Now they treat me like a criminal. They push, push, push. They say, ‘Where do you think he made the bomb? It took 12 seconds to go off — how do you think they set off the bomb?’ ”
It was unclear, however, whether the members of the Joint Terrorism Task Force and federal prosecutors have concluded that Ms. Russell has no criminal culpability in the attacks, the person said. The F.B.I. declined to comment. But aggressive and accusatory questioning may simply reflect its determination to be absolutely certain that the bombing conspiracy did not extend beyond the Tsarnaev brothers. Investigators have found no link to foreign militant groups, despite Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s travel to Russia’s Caucasus region last year.
The homegrown theory received additional support on Thursday when officials confirmed a report by CBS News that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev had scribbled an explanation of the bombing before his arrest on April 19.
After the death of Tamerlan in a police shootout, Dzhokhar hid inside a neighbor’s boat and wrote with a pen on the inside of the hull that the attack was retribution for the wars the United States waged in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to two law enforcement officials. The note stated generally that an attack on one Muslim is an attack on all Muslims, one official said.
In Senate testimony on Thursday, the F.B.I. director, Robert S. Mueller III, suggested that the evidence pointed to “homegrown violent extremists,” but he said investigators “continue in our ongoing efforts to identify any others who may be responsible.”
The note written on the boat, which is likely to become evidence at any trial for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, fits with his statements to investigators that the brothers were inspired by calls for jihad against America, not the anti-Russian insurgency in the Caucasus.
But the F.B.I. has worked closely with Russian security officials to understand what Tamerlan did between January and July 2012 in Dagestan in southern Russia, where he reportedly sought to meet with militants.
And the Boston investigation is playing out at a time of especially tangled relations between the United States and Russia, typified by the announcement late Monday by Russian authorities that they had caught a C.I.A. officer trying to recruit a Russian intelligence source who specializes in the North Caucasus.
Glen E. Howard, president of the Jamestown Foundation, a research organization that focuses in part on the Caucasus, said Russian officials might have encouraged the F.B.I. to focus on Mr. Khadzhimuratov as an indirect way to sully his former boss, Mr. Zakayev, the target for years of Russian extradition appeals and alleged Russian assassination schemes.
“I have a fear that the F.B.I. may be led by the F.S.B. to go after people who are opponents of Russia but are not terrorists,” he said.
The Khadzhimuratovs’ quiet life in Manchester for the last eight years stands in contrast to the years that preceded it. Both grew up in Grozny, Chechnya’s capital, and they married when he was 20 and she was 16. He worked as a bodyguard for Mr. Zakayev from 1996 to 1999, he said, when Mr. Zakayev was a leader in the first Chechen war against Russia and then deputy prime minister of a short-lived government in Grozny.
After Mr. Zakayev left Russia and became an exiled leader of the Chechen independence movement, Mr. Khadzhimuratov was confronted by Russian security forces on Jan. 2, 2001, he said, and shot in front of his wife and young children. Family members bribed the police to take him from Chechnya to a hospital in neighboring Ingushetia; from there the family went to Azerbaijan, where they lived until 2004. That year, with the support of the United Nations refugee program, they came to Manchester.
Mr. Khadzhimuratov has been turned down repeatedly for a green card because of his previous association with the Chechen rebels, though his wife is an American citizen. Among the videos archived on Mr. Khadzhimuratov’s Russian YouTube page were a few that touched on Caucasus insurgency, including addresses by two militant leaders, Doku K. Umarov and Said Buryatsky, and video of a sniper attack on the police by militants in Dagestan.
But he and his wife say the F.B.I.’s attention has come as a shock, bringing back painful memories of being under official scrutiny in Chechnya years ago.
“I’m scared,” Ms. Khadzhimuratova said. “I just want to save my family.”

Scott Shane reported from Washington, and Ellen Barry from Moscow. William K. Rashbaum and Richard A. Oppel Jr. contributed reporting from New York.