BOSTON — More details have been released about the three young men who the FBI arrested Wednesday in Boston.
They’re all college friends of the surviving Boston bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.
The men’s attorney’s say none of them knew anything about the bombings. But the FBI affidavit incriminates the trio. All three men remain in jail.
Two of the men have been identified as Azamat Tazhayako and Dias Kadyrbayev. They are from Kazakhstan and shared a dorm room with 19-year-old Boston bombing suspect Dzokhar Tsarnaev at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.
The other man, Robel Phillipos, an American, is also a friend of Tsarnaev’s, according to law enforcement officials. They are charged with conspiring to obstruct justice and making false statements.
A U.S. federal law enforcement official said the trio may have lied about seeing one or both of the Tsarnaev brothers after the April 15 attack and threw away items from Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s dorm room. Dzhokhar’s older brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, was killed in a shootout with police days after the bombings that killed three and injured scores of others.
Authorities suspect two of the men of moving things from Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s dorm room and throwing them into a trash bin, a federal law enforcement official said. The source said the objects thrown out included fireworks inside backpacks. The trash bin was subsequently taken to a landfill. Authorities carried out a two-day search of the landfill in New Bedford, Massachusetts late last week.
Alan Dershowitz, a prominent defense attorney and Harvard law professor, said at least two of the additional three people arrested do not appear “to have been charged with anything relating to the bombing itself.”
“If they knew about the bombing, if they were involved in the bombing, the charges would be conspiracy to do the acts for which the other man has already been charged,” Dershowitz said Wednesday. “So it sounds like at this point in time the only evidence they have is actions that took place after the bombing.”
