As The Jewish Press reported six months ago, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the older brother implicated in the Boston Marathon Bombings may well have been involved in what had been an unsolved triple murder case which also took place in the Boston area.
And what The Jewish Press noted, but which had not yet been widely discussed, is that not only did Tamerlan Tsarnaev know all three of the young men whose throats were slashed open, but that the murders occurred on September 11, 2011, exactly ten years to the day after the Islamist assault on America which resulted in the murder of innocent thousands.
Well, now we have a piece of real evidence linking Tsarnaev to the triple murder.
“According to Todashev, Tamerlan Tsarnaev participated in the Waltham homicides,” federal prosecutors said in a court filing, though they did not elaborate.
According to federal prosecutors in the criminal case against the Dzokhar Tsarnaev, the younger, sole surviving suspect in the Boston Marathon Bombings, a friend of the older brother Tamerlan, Ibragim Todashev, said that Tamerlan “participated in the Waltham homicides.”
Todashev had been a person of interest connected to the Tsarnaevs whom federal authorities were pursuing, but on the day he was interrogated by an FBI agent, he was shot and killed. That death remains under investigation.
The information became public this week because Dzokhar’s lawyers filed a motion to compel the release of evidence in the possession of the prosecution, including information about the Waltham triple murders. Prosecutors opposed the motion.
Erik Weissman, 31 of Waltham, Raphael Terek, 37, of Waltham and Brendan Mess, 25, of Waltham were murdered on September 11, 2011. Terek and Weissman were Jewish, and Weissman was a graduate of Brandeis University, a Jewish-affiliated school also located in Waltham.At the time of the murders, authorities seemed quick to dismiss the gruesome murder as a drug-deal gone bad, but the fact that there was no sign of forced entry and that more than $7000 worth of marijuana was spread around the three bodies belied this tack.
No one seemed to even notice that the murders took place on the tenth anniversary of the September 11th attacks.
But after the Tsarnaevs were identified as suspects in the Marathon bombings, people who noted at the time of the murders that Tamerlan, who had been very close with one of the three murder victims, never showed up for the funeral or any memorial service, and people began to talk.
Although there has been speculation before that Todashev named Tamerlan Tsarnaev as having been involved in the Waltham triple murder, the documents filed in court this week provided the first official evidence.
Todashev’s death at the hands of an FBI agent who had been interrogating him initially resulted in an outpouring of sympathy for the slain Chechen former wrestler. However, a former live-in girlfriend’s complaints of abuse by U.S. authorities clashed with the mourning by someone claiming to be Todashev’s widow who had remained overseas during Todashev’s tenure in the U.S.
Of course, there are advocates for people involved in all kinds of unpleasant business. The Florida branch of the Council for American-Islamic Relations, CAIR, requested the US Department of Justice open an investigation into the allegations of civil rights violations and abuse by the FBI of Todashev’s friends.