The dispute over where to bury suspected Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev escalated Wednesday as a police chief urged someone to step forward with a cemetery plot, saying: “We are not barbarians. We bury the dead.”
The plea from Worcester Police Chief Gary Gemme in Massachusetts state came a day after he said that a deal struck Monday to bury the 26-year-old’s remains at a state prison site dissolved, with state officials no longer offering cooperation Tuesday.
Police said it’s costing the department tens of thousands of dollars to provide security at the funeral home that is holding Tsarnaev’s body, and officer details are wasting precious resources.
Gemme said sending the body to Russia is “not an option,” as Boston Mayor Thomas Menino suggested Tuesday, when he also said through an aide that he didn’t want the bombing suspect buried in Boston.
Worcester funeral home director Peter Stefan has said none of the 120 offers of graves from the U.S. and Canada have worked out because officials in those cities and towns don’t want the body.
At the same time, U.S. law enforcement officials have been trying to determine whether Tamerlan Tsarnaev was indoctrinated or trained by militants during a 2012 visit to Dagestan, a Caspian Sea province that has become the center of a simmering Islamic insurgency.
On Tuesday, FBI director Robert Mueller discussed the bombing investigation with his Russian counterparts during a trip to Moscow. The U.S. and Russia have been collaborating on a criminal investigation into the late 26-year-old and his brother, 19-year-old bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.
Authorities allege the two brothers carried out the April 15 bombings near the race’s finish line, using pressure cookers packed with explosives, nails, ball bearings and metal shards. The attack killed three people and injured more than 260 others.
Tamerlan died following a gunbattle with police, and authorities captured Dzhokhar after a massive manhunt following his escape from the same encounter. The younger brother is now in a prison hospital, facing charges that could bring the death penalty.
On Tuesday, the father of a student charged with conspiracy in the Boston Marathon bombing case said his son believes Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is “not a human” if he’s responsible for the attacks.
Amir Ismagulov, the father of Azamat Tazhayakov, said he has visited his son once in prison since arriving in the United States from Kazakhstan more than a week ago.
“Azamat loves the United States and the people of the United States,” Ismagulov said as Arkady Bukh, his son’s new Russian-speaking lawyer, translated for him.
Tazhayakov is in a federal prison on charges that he conspired to destroy, conceal and cover up objects belonging to Tsarnaev, a college friend from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. He faces up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine if found guilty.
Ismagulov, 46, who works in the oil field business in Kazakhstan, described his son as an engineering student who was “happy in life” before “in one day, his life was shattered.” He said Tazhayakov told him “it took days to get out of the shock because of the accusations” against him.
Bukh, a New York City lawyer from the former Soviet Union, said his client helped hand over Tsarnaev’s laptop to the FBI on April 19 after he and friend Dias Kadyrbayev learned that federal agents were looking for them. Kadyrbayev also is charged with obstruction of justice in the bombing case. A third college friend, Robel Phillipos, got out of federal lockup on $100,000 bond Monday while awaiting trial for allegedly lying to federal investigators.
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