Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev indicted on 30 counts

Boston bombing suspect indicted on 30 counts

Peter Finn

Indictment details Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s interest in radical Islamist literature and his attempts to justify the attacks.

• Read the indictment in the case

View Photo Gallery — Boston Marathon bombing: Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the surviving brother, is charged with using a weapon of mass destruction, which carries a maximum sentence of death or life in prison.

By Peter Finn, Thursday, June 27, 3:45 PM E-mail the writer

A federal grand jury Thursday returned a 30-count indictment against Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the suspect in the April 15 Boston Marathon bombings.
The indictment detailed the 19-year-old’s interest in radical Islamist literature before the fatal explosions, as well as his attempts to justify the attacks in a series of messages he scrawled inside a dry-docked boat just before his capture.

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Tsarnaev, an ethnic Chechen from Russia and a naturalized U.S. citizen, was charged with the use of a weapon of mass destruction resulting in death; the bombing a public place that resulted in death; and the murder of a Massachusetts Institute of Technology police officer, among other charges.
Seventeen of the charges carry the death penalty or life in prison, the U.S. Attorney’s office in Boston said.
The indictment describes how Tsarnaev and his older brother, Tamerlan, who was killed in a shootout with police April 19, moved toward the finish line at the Boston Marathon carrying improvised explosive devices in black backpacks. The brothers spoke for a few seconds on cellphones before detonating the bombs, which killed three people and wounded more than 260 others.
The instructions for the bombs — made of pressure cookers, low-explosive powder and shrapnel — were downloaded by Tsarnaev from the magazine Inspire, an English-language publication produced by al-Qaeda’s Yemeni affiliate, according to the indictment.
The indictment said Tsarnaev had downloaded a number of radical publications, including a digital copy of a book titled “The Slicing Sword,” which calls on Muslims not to offer allegiances to governments that “invade Muslim lands.” A foreword to the book was written by Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born propagandist for al-Qaeda’s Yemeni affiliate who was killed in a joint CIA-military drone operation in Yemen in September 2011.
Tsarnaev, who escaped a police cordon after the shootout in Watertown, Mass, hid inside a boat in a back yard in the town. On the inside walls and beams of the boat, according to the indictment, Tsarnaev wrote: “The U.S. Government is killing our innocent civilians” and “I can’t stand to see such evil go unpunished.”

Julie Tate contributed to this report.
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