FBI kills man questioned over links to Boston bombing suspect
Posted May 23, 2013 7:18 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
The FBI says one of its agents shot dead a man being questioned over links to one of the Boston marathon bomb suspects because he turned violent.
The shooting happened at an apartment complex in Florida on Wednesday.
Ibragim Todashev was being interviewed about links to Tamerlan Tsarnaev.
Todashev was of Chechen origin like the Tsarnaev brothers, who are suspected of carrying out the bombings.
A friend of Todashev said he knew Tsarnaev but wasn’t involved in the attack and had wanted to leave the country.
“He cancelled the tickets because the FBI had been like, I don’t know, they’d been pushing him, you know what I’m saying, they’d been pushing him. They said ‘don’t leave, don’t leave’ so he decided to stay. But we had a feeling, worst case scenario, that something like that’s going to happen, you know what I mean? And it happened eventually and we tried to avoid it,” Todashev’s friend Khusn Taramiv said.
Three people were killed and 264 others were wounded when two pressure-cooker bombs exploded at the finish line of the Boston marathon in April.
Authorities were also stepping up their investigation into possible connections between Tsarnaev, who died in a shootout with police, and an unsolved 2011 triple homicide in a Boston suburb that investigators believe was drug related.
NBC News reported on Wednesday that the man killed in Florida had confessed to the FBI that he had played a role in the 2011 murders. A U.S. government official close to the investigation had no immediate comment.
Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, and his 19-year-old brother Dzhokhar are suspected of setting off two pressure-cooker bombs at the marathon finish line. Dzhokhar is being held at a prison hospital west of Boston awaiting trial on charges that carry the possibility of death penalty, if convicted.
