The lawyers said that Mr. Phillipos, 19, had nothing to do with the
bombings and was frightened and confused when he was interrogated about
going with two other friends to the college dorm room of Dzhokhar
Tsarnaev, one of the two chief suspects in the case, and removing a backpack and fireworks that the investigators consider to be evidence. The other suspect, Mr. Tsarnaev’s older brother, Tamerlan, 26, died after a shootout with the police.
As Washington gears up this week for its first hearings on the Boston
Marathon bombings, Representative Peter T. King, Republican of New York,
said Sunday that he believed the brothers did not act alone.
“It’s very difficult to believe that these two could have carried out
this level of attack with this level of sophistication and precision
acting by themselves, either without training from overseas or having at
least facilitators here at home,” Mr. King, a former chairman of the
House Committee on Homeland Security, said on the CNN program “State of the Union.”
Noting that there were multiple bombs involved, he added, “No, I think there had to be assistance, and that’s why the F.B.I., I think, is going after this so vigorously and effectively.”
So far, only Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, has been charged
with carrying out the bombings, which killed three people and wounded
more than 260 others on April 15 near the finish line of the prestigious
Boston race. His brother, Tamerlan, died after the brothers tried to
elude the authorities; according to his death certificate, he was killed
by gunshot wounds and blunt trauma after being hit by an S.U.V. driven
by Dzhokhar as he fled.
The F.B.I. on Sunday conducted another search of Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s
apartment in Cambridge. A senior law enforcement official, who asked not
to be identified, said that it was a routine follow-up search, but did
not elaborate on what, if anything, the F.B.I. found.
Gordon Lindley, who lives across the street from the building, said he
saw what appeared to be law enforcement officials, including two to
three men wearing F.B.I. jackets, carry at least a dozen boxes to a
large truck.
Also on Sunday, an uncle of the Tsarnaev brothers arrived with three
friends at a funeral home in Worcester, Mass., to prepare Tamerlan’s
body for burial, although the question was where.
“I’m dealing with logistics,” said the uncle, Ruslan Tsarni, a
businessman from Maryland who said he had not seen either of the
Tsarnaev brothers in about five years. “A dead person needs to be buried
— that’s what tradition requires, that’s what religion requires, that’s
what morals require.”
Peter Stefan, the owner of the Graham Putnam & Mahoney Funeral
Parlors, has been criticized for accepting the body. On Sunday, a small
group of protesters gathered with American flags and signs with phrases
like “Bury this terrorist on US soil and we will unbury him.”
Mr. Stefan has been unable to find a cemetery willing to accept the body
and said he planned to call cemeteries with areas reserved for Muslims,
as well as the city of Cambridge, Mass., where Mr. Tsarnaev lived.
But the Cambridge city manager, Robert W. Healy, pre-emptively issued a
statement on Sunday urging Mr. Stefan and the family not to make such a
request. “I have determined that it is not in the best interest of
‘peace within the city’ to execute a cemetery deed for a plot within the
Cambridge Cemetery for the body of Tamerlan Tsarnaev,” said Mr. Healy,
who said that federal officials should handle it.
Mr. Tsarni emerged wearily from the funeral home’s work room after
spending hours washing and wrapping his nephew’s body with three of his
friends.
“We did what we have to do, something no one else could have done,” he said. “Now all we need is a little luck.”
Mr. Tsarni said he had had little contact with Mr. Tsarnaev’s immediate
family, although he had spoken to the brothers’ father. “He’s not really
in a reasonable state of mind,” Mr. Tsarni said. He had not spoken to
Katherine Russell, 24, Tamerlan’s widow. “I wanted to,” Mr. Tsarni said.
“She’s been the closest person to him.” The uncle said he planned to
visit Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who is in a medical prison center at Fort
Devens, Mass. “This is another person left all to himself,” Mr. Tsarni
said.
Mr. Phillipos is to appear in Federal District Court in Boston on Monday
and will ask to be released on bond, his lawyers said. In a criminal
complaint filed last week, federal investigators said that Mr. Phillipos
had given three versions of events on the night of April 18 — the day
that the F.B.I. released photographs of two men identified as suspects —
until he admitted that he and two other friends had gone to Mr.
Tsarnaev’s dorm room on the campus of the University of Massachusetts
Dartmouth.
The other two friends — Azamat Tazhayakov and Dias Kadyrbayev,
originally from Kazakhstan — have been charged with obstruction of
justice and destroying evidence, and each face a five-year prison
sentence and $250,000 in fines. They are to appear in court next week.
Mr. Phillipos, an American, faces a stiffer sentence: eight years in
prison and $250,000 in fines.
Mr. Phillipos’s lawyers, Derege B. Demissie and Susan B. Church, said in
the court papers that the charges against their client were
“refutable.”
They said that he was no longer enrolled at the college and had not seen
Mr. Tsarnaev or the others for two months. Then, by “sheer coincidence
and bad luck,” he happened to be on campus for a seminar on April 18.
Mr. Phillipos, who attended high school with Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, was
questioned a number of times without a lawyer present, his lawyers
wrote.
“This case is about a frightened and confused 19-year-old who was
subjected to intense questioning and interrogation, without the benefit
of counsel and in the context of one of the worst attacks against the
nation,” the lawyers wrote. “The weight of the federal government under
such circumstances can have a devastatingly crushing effect on the
ability of an adolescent to withstand the enormous pressure and respond
rationally.”
In an attempt to show that Mr. Phillipos is not a flight risk, his
lawyers said he “comes from a well-educated family and was raised by a
hard-working single mother” as she pursued three college degrees,
including a bachelor’s degree in political science from Northeastern
University and a master’s degree in social work from Boston University.
His mother, Genet Bekele, is a social worker who emigrated from
Ethiopia, lives in Cambridge and specializes in handling domestic
violence cases. She filed one of several affidavits attesting to her
son’s character, saying she had raised him “with Christian values and
taught him the value of working hard.”
“My whole family is in complete shock over the accusation made against him,” she said.
No comments:
Post a Comment