Shock at 2 brothers suspected to be Boston bombers

Friends and relatives plead for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, describe him as positive and bright; elder brother, Tamerlan, leaves behind 3-year-old daughter

BOSTON (AP) — Two brothers, one now dead, one alive and at large. Hours after the first grainy images of them were released to the public by the FBI, a portrait quickly emerged Friday of the young men suspected in Monday’s deadly Boston Marathon bombing.

Stunned friends pleaded for the surviving brother, 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, described as bright and outgoing, to turn himself in and not hurt anyone. Classmates reported seeing him on his university campus after the attacks, looking calm.

His older brother Tamerlan, a talented boxer who is said to have a wife and young daughter, was believed to be 26 when he was killed overnight in a shootout with police.

Relatives of the brothers expressed shock, disbelief and anger.

“My children have never seen guns, only on television,” their father, Anzor Tsarnaev, told The Associated Press in the Russian city of Makhachkala. “I have confidence in my children, in their innocence,” he said. “I don’t know what happened over there, how this came about. Only the God Almighty and the person who did it know what really happened, and the Almighty will punish them for that.”

The brothers, who had lived in the violence-wracked region of Dagestan in southern Russia, lived together and had been in the country for about a decade, according to an uncle, Ruslan Tsarni.

Tsami, speaking outside his Maryland home, urged Dzhokhar to turn himself in and ask for forgiveness. He said he hadn’t seen his nephews for several years, and he said the family is ashamed. “If somebody radicalized them … it’s not my brother, who just moved back to Russia,” he said.

An aunt, Maret Tsarnaeva, told reporters in Toronto that Tamerlan recently became a devout Muslim who prayed five times a day, and she doesn’t believe the brothers could have been involved in the bombing.

She said her brother was desperate when he found out Tamerlan dropped out of his university, because he had high hopes for his bright son.

Tamerlan married and had a 3-year-old daughter in the US, Tsarnaeva said.

“He has a wife in Boston and from a Christian family, so you can’t tie it to religion,” she said.

Tamerlan once said he hoped to fight for the US Olympic team and become a naturalized American.

“I don’t have a single American friend. I don’t understand them.” he was quoted as saying in a photo package that appeared in a Boston University student magazine in 2010.

Government officials said Tamerlan traveled to Russia last year and returned to the US six months later. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they couldn’t publicly talk about an investigation in progress.

Dzhokhar had attended the prestigious Cambridge Rindge and Latin school, participating on the wrestling team. In May 2011, his senior year, he was awarded a $2,500 scholarship from the city to pursue higher education, according to a news release at the time.

He attended the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, university officials said Friday, as the campus was evacuated. The school would not say what he was studying.

Classmates said they saw him on campus after the bombing. “He was regular, he was calm,” said Harry Danso, who told the AP he saw Dzhokhar in the hallway of their dormitory this week.

The father, Anzor Tsaraev, said his younger son was a second-year student studying medicine.

“My son is a true angel …,” he said. “He is such an intelligent boy. We expected him to come on holidays here.”

Dzhokhar’s page on the Russian social networking site Vkontakte says that before moving to the United States he attended School No. 1 in Makhachkala, the capital of Dagestan. The predominantly Muslim republic has become an epicenter of the Islamic insurgency that spilled over from the region of Chechnya.

On the site, Dzhokhar describes himself as speaking Chechen as well as English and Russian. His world view is described as “Islam” and he says his personal goal is “career and money.”

On Friday, those who knew him were stunned. A host of a Boston-based public radio program, Robin Young, posted on Twitter a photo of her nephew with Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, their arms around each other, at their graduation.

“Heartbreaking pic,” Young wrote.

Before moving to Dagestan, the Tsarnaev family lived in Kyrgyzstan, a former Soviet republic in Central Asia. Leila Alieva, who went to school with Tamerlan in the Kyrgyz town of Tokmok, remembered an educated family.

Tamerlan “was a very positive boy, a good student, a jock, a boxer,” Alieva said.

She remembered Dzhokhar as a little boy and said the family also had two sisters. She described the family as “very educated, of middle income.” They had relatives in the US and left, she said.

“I can’t believe they were involved in the explosions, because Tamerlan was a very positive guy, and they were not very Islamist,” Alieva said. “They were Muslim but had a secular lifestyle.”

According to the website spotcrime.com, Tamerlan was arrested for domestic violence in July 2009, after assaulting his girlfriend. That report could not be immediately confirmed.

“I like the USA,” Tamerlan was quoted as saying in The Sun of Lowell, Massachusetts in 2004. “America has a lot of jobs. That’s something Russia doesn’t have. You have a chance to make money here if you are willing to work.”