Federal authorities and local cops are vehemently denying that they knew the identities of alleged Boston Marathon bombers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev before releasing their images to the public, in response to a pointed letter from an Iowa senator that questions whether the FBI had a bead on the terror suspects before their desperate and deadly attempt to flee.
“To be absolutely clear: No one was surveilling the Tsarnaevs and they were not identified until after the shootout,” the FBI, Boston police and Massachusetts State Police said in a joint statement this afternoon, in reference to the wild April 19 gunfight that left Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, dead. “Any claims to the contrary are false.”
Iowa Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley asked FBI Director James Comey Jr. in a letter what feds did to attempt to ID the Tsarnaevs before publishing their photos, and why FBI agents were spotted conducting surveillance near Central Square on April 18 — just hours before authorities say the brothers ambushed and murdered MIT campus cop Sean Collier. The letter also notes that the Joint Terrorism Task Force, which has been chided for failure to share information with local authorities in the past, never told Cambridge cops about the surveillance operation. Grassley is the ranking member on the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Authorities said the Joint Terrorism Task Force “was at M.I.T., located in Cambridge, MA, on April 18, 2013, on a matter unrelated to the Tsarnaev brothers.”
Grassley’s letter also asks whether the FBI, whose Joint Terrorism Task Force investigated Tamerlan Tsarnaev in 2011, ever attempted to recruit the brothers as informants or sources. Authorities said today they did not.
“The Tsarnaev brothers were never sources for the FBI nor did the FBI attempt to recruit them as source,” the statement said.
Grassley’s office says he has not received a response from the FBI.
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