Mayor nixes Boston burial for bomb suspect

BOSTON (AP) — An aide to Boston Mayor Thomas Menino says the mayor does not want marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev buried in Boston and calls the decision “a family issue.”

The aide said Tuesday Menino believes the body should be sent back to Russia, where his parents live. Menino believes it wouldn’t be appropriate for the burial to be in Boston.

The 26-year-old Tsarnaev, a resident of Cambridge, was killed in a police shootout days after the April 15 bombings that killed three people and injured more than 260. His brother remains imprisoned on charges in the case.

Worcester funeral home director Peter Stefan says more than 100 people in the U.S. and Canada have offered burial plots for the body, but officials in those cities and towns have said no.

FBI director Robert Mueller discussed the Boston Marathon bombings investigation with his Russian counterparts on Tueday during a trip to Moscow.

FBI spokesman Michael Kortan said the visit was productive and that Mueller is now on his way to other overseas destinations. Kortan declined to elaborate on conversations in Moscow about the Boston bombing probe.

The U.S. and Russia have been collaborating on the criminal investigation into the two suspects in the Boston case.

Russian agents placed the elder Boston bombing suspect under surveillance during a six-month visit to southern Russia last year, then scrambled to find him when he suddenly disappeared after police killed a Canadian jihadist, a Russian security official has told The Associated Press.

U.S. law enforcement officials have been trying to determine whether Tsarnaev was indoctrinated or trained by militants during his visit to Dagestan, a Caspian Sea province that has become the center of a simmering Islamic insurgency.

The Russian security official with the Anti-Extremism Center, a federal agency under Russia’s Interior Ministry, told the AP that Russian agents were watching Tsarnaev, and that they searched for him when he disappeared two days after the July 2012 death of the Canadian man, William Plotnikov, who had joined the Islamic insurgency in the region. The Russian official spoke only on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the news media.

Copyright 2013 The Associated Press.