Feds reveal Boston bomb suspect's hide-out note

USA Today/May 22, 2014

By Donna Leinwand Leger

Dzokhar Tsarnaev, charged with the terrorist attack on the Boston Marathon last year, wrote in a note as he hid from police in a boat that he was jealous of his dead brother for going to the "garden of paradise."

Prosecutors revealed excerpts of the note and other details of the attack in documents filed Wednesday in the U.S. District Court in Boston.

Tsarnaev, writing in pencil, asked Allah to make him a martyr.

"God has a plan for each person," he wrote. "Mine was to hide in this boat and shed some light on our actions."

Tsarnaev, 20, could face the death penalty if convicted of plotting and executing the April 15, 2013, bomb attack that killed a child and two women and seriously injured more than 260 people. Tamerlan Tsarnaev, his older brother and alleged accomplice, was killed when his brother ran over him fleeing a shootout with police in Watertown, Mass.

Tsarnaev was found 20 hours later, hiding in a boat parked on a trailer in the driveway of a Watertown home. He had been shot and was bleeding.

The disclosures come in court papers as Tsarnaev's attorneys fight to keep the note and statements gathered at Tsarnaev's hospital bedside from being used in his trial.

"The U.S. Government is killing our innocent civilians," Tsarnaev wrote. "I can't stand to see such evil go unpunished, we Muslims are one body, you hurt one you hurt us all."

He warned that the U.S. is "fighting men who look into the barrel of your gun and see heaven, so how can you compete with that. We are promised victory and we will surely get it."

Prosecutors argue that at the time of Tsarnaev's arrest, police feared that the suspects had planted other bombs and were working at the direction of al-Qaeda as part of a larger terrorism plot, so the hospital interrogation was essential.

At the time of his arrest, police had recovered only one of the two remote-control detonators used during the marathon and thought the brothers may have kept one to detonate additional bombs in other cities, prosecutors wrote in court papers.

Police also surmised that the brothers had outside help to make the bombs because of their sophistication, court papers say. The bomb fuses were made from Christmas lights, and the remote-control detonators where made from model car parts, prosecutors wrote.

Investigators found no evidence of the fine black powder explosive used to make the bombs in searches of the brothers' homes or cars. Police suspected others may have helped the brothers crush and empty hundreds of fireworks to get enough powder for the bombs.

Tsarnaev smashed both his cellphones, including one that appeared to be a newly purchased prepaid "burner" phone, before hiding in the boat, which prosecutors say demonstrated "basic elements of apparent terrorist tradecraft."

Contributing: William M. Welch

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