Boston marathon suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev planned to bomb Times Square, says New York Mayor
The Boston marathon bombers planned to travel to New York and mount a second attack with six more bombs, Mayor Michael Bloomberg has said.
Mr Bloomberg and Ray Kelly, the New York police commissioner, said the brothers held another pressure-cooker bomb like the two they detonated at the Boston marathon last Monday, killing three people and wounding more than 200. They also had five pipe bombs, the city officials said.
The bombers were previously reported by The Boston Globe to have told the driver of a vehicle they carjacked shortly before Friday’s shootout: "We just killed a cop. We blew up the Marathon. And now we're going to New York."
Mr Kelly said at Thursday’s press conference that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev had told investigators that he and his his brother had initially planned to escape to New York to “party”, but had “spontaneously” decided instead to mount a second attack.
The police commissioner added that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev had twice visited Times Square in recent times and that authorities held surveillance footage of him there in April last year. The purpose of his visit was not known.
The Daily Telegraph has obtained an undated photograph of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev in Times Square with a group of friends, one of whom was arrested by police in New Bedford, Massachusetts, following the capture of the bombers last week. The image was posted to the network on April 18, 2012.
The suspects' father, Anzor Tsarnaev, said at an emotional press conference in the Russian republic of Dagestan today that he would travel to the US to bury his older son, and promised that he did not intend to attack America.
“I don’t have any bad intentions - I don’t plan to blow up anything,” said Mr Tsarnaev, 47, using his fist to strike a table at which he was sitting with the suspects’ mother, Zubeidat.
He said he wanted to “find out the truth”, as family members continued to allege that the brothers had been framed in an elaborate hoax.
Mrs Tsarnaeva was reported to have known as early as 2011 that her son Tamerlan had been radicalised and had said “he was willing to die for Islam”.
Citing two officials familiar with an FBI briefing given to lawmakers on Capitol Hill, Fox News reported that Tamerlan had made the remarks in text messages sent to family members in Russia.
Mrs Tsarnaeva dominated proceedings at the chaotic press briefing called by the parents at a newspaper office in the Dagestani capital Makhachkala.
She gesticulated and shouted that her sons were innocent, while her husband — dressed in black and wearing a pair of shiny aviator sunglasses — interjected only occasionally.
Both parents said they believed Tamerlan had been detained alive - rather than dying in a shoot-out with police - and later killed.
“I wanted to scream to the whole world, 'What did you do?’” said Mrs Tsarnaeva, 46. “What have you done with my son? He was alive. Why did you need to kill him? Why didn’t you send him to Guantanamo or whatever? Why? Why? Why did they have to kill him? They got him alive, he was in their hands.”
Speaking to The Daily Telegraph earlier in the day, Mrs Tsarnaeva said that several mosques in the Boston area had refused requests from her son’s relatives to bury him there. “They are afraid,” she said.
It also emerged today that the student who was briefly wrongly identified on social media as the perpetrator of the Boston bombings has been found dead in a park.
Sunil Tripathi, 22, was last seen on March 16. His cause of death has not yet been determined.
