US lawmakers on a mission to Russia said on Sunday they had found no evidence that an US intelligence error enabled the Boston bombings, but that closer cooperation between Washington and Moscow might have helped to thwart the attack.
US investigators suspect two brothers who emigrated from Russia, one since shot dead by police, staged the attack at the Boston Marathon on April 15 that killed three people and wounded 264 others.
Two of the congressmen on the fact-finding visit said the countries had to work together better against a shared threat from Islamist militants.
Photo: Reuters
“Radical Islam is at our throat in the United States, and it is at the throat of the Russian people,” said Republican Representative Dana Rohrabacher, who led a group of six US lawmakers on the week-long visit to Russia.
US President Barack Obama’s administration and US intelligence have faced scrutiny over claims they failed to see the danger from the suspects, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, ethnic Chechens who emigrated with their parents a decade ago.
“We’ve been asked a number of times, do we believe that the Boston Marathon massacre could have been thwarted — could it have been prevented? And the answer is, there’s nothing specific that could have been done that we can point to that, had it been done differently, would have prevented this,” Rohrabacher said.
“But we can say that had we had a much higher level of cooperation all along, so that the whole situation would have been different, I believe that would have been one of the type of things we could have thwarted,” he told a news conference at the US embassy in Moscow.
The US lawmakers met Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) officials and visited the North Caucasus town of Beslan, scene of a deadly 2004 school siege some Russians call their country’s equivalent of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the US.
“The Cold War is over now, so we have to make friends with the Russians and recognize there is a mutual threat to both of us,” Rohrabacher told the news conference.
It was attended by US action film actor Steven Seagal, a friend of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s who helped arrange the representatives’ meetings in Russia.
US officials have said Russian security services asked the FBI about Tamerlan Tsarnaev in early 2011 out of concern he had embraced radical Islam and would travel to Russia to join insurgents.
FBI agents interviewed him in Massachusetts in 2011, but said they found no serious reason for alarm. US officials say Russia’s FSB security services later failed to respond to the FBI’s requests for more information about him.
Reading from notes from a briefing with FSB officials, Republican Representative Steve King said they indicated the FSB had told the FBI that Tamerlan was “very close to radical Islam and very religious.”
“I suspect that he was raised to do what he did,” King said of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, who died in an April 19 shootout with police.
Dzhokhar, 19, is in a Massachusetts prison hospital awaiting trial.
Tamerlan Tsarnaev travelled to Russia early last year and spent six months in Dagestan, that is now at the center of the Islamist insurgency rooted in two post-Soviet separatist wars in Chechnya.
The FBI did not tell the FSB that he had returned to Russia, the lawmakers said.
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