MOTHER OF BOMB SUSPECTS FOUND DEEPER SPIRITUALITY
The Associated Press
April 28, 2013 Sunday 10:43 PM GMT
By DAVID CARUSO, MICHAEL KUNZELMAN and MAX SEDDON, Associated Press
BOSTON
In photos of her as a younger woman, Zubeidat Tsarnaeva wears a
low-cut blouse and has her hair teased like a 1980s rock star. After
she arrived in the U.S. from Russia in 2002, she went to beauty school
and did facials at a suburban day spa.
But in recent years, people noticed a change. She began wearing a hijab
and cited conspiracy theories about 9/11 being a plot against Muslims.
Now known as the angry and grieving mother of the Boston Marathon
bombing suspects, Tsarnaeva is drawing increased attention after
federal officials say Russian authorities intercepted her phone calls,
including one in which she vaguely discussed jihad with her elder son.
In another, she was recorded talking to someone in southern Russia who
is under FBI investigation in an unrelated case, U.S. officials said.
Tsarnaeva insists there is no mystery. She’s no terrorist, just someone
who found a deeper spirituality. She insists her sons Tamerlan, who
was killed in a gunfight with police, and Dzhokhar, who was wounded
and captured are innocent.
“It’s all lies and hypocrisy,” she told The Associated Press in
Dagestan. “I’m sick and tired of all this nonsense that they make
up about me and my children. People know me as a regular person,
and I’ve never been mixed up in any criminal intentions, especially
any linked to terrorism.”
Amid the scrutiny, Tsarnaeva and her ex-husband, Anzor Tsarnaev, say
they have put off the idea of any trip to the U.S. to reclaim their
elder son’s body or try to visit Dzhokhar in jail. Tsarnaev told the
AP on Sunday he was too ill to travel to the U.S. Tsarnaeva faces
a 2012 shoplifting charge in a Boston suburb, though it was unclear
whether that was a deterrent.
At a news conference in Dagestan with Anzor last week, Tsarnaeva
appeared overwhelmed with grief one moment, defiant the next. “They
already are talking about that we are terrorists, I am terrorist,”
she said. “They already want me, him and all of us to look (like)
terrorists.”
Tsarnaeva arrived in the U.S. in 2002, settling in a working-class
section of Cambridge, Mass. With four children, Anzor and Zubeidat
qualified for food stamps and were on and off public assistance
benefits for years. The large family squeezed itself into a third-floor
apartment.
Zubeidat took classes at the Catherine Hinds Institute of Esthetics,
before becoming a state-licensed aesthetician. Anzor, who had studied
law, fixed cars.
By some accounts, the family was tolerant.
Bethany Smith, a New Yorker who befriended Zubeidat’s two daughters,
said in an interview with Newsday that when she stayed with the family
for a month in 2008 while she looked at colleges, she was welcomed
even though she was Christian and had tattoos.
“I had nothing but love over there. They accepted me for who I was,”
Smith told the newspaper. “Their mother, Zubeidat, she considered me
to be a part of the family. She called me her third daughter.”
Zubeidat said she and Tamerlan began to turn more deeply into their
Muslim faith about five years ago after being influenced by a family
friend, named “Misha.” The man, whose full name she didn’t reveal,
impressed her with a religious devotion that was far greater than
her own, even though he was an ethnic Armenian who converted to Islam.
“I wasn’t praying until he prayed in our house, so I just got really
ashamed that I am not praying, being a Muslim, being born Muslim. I
am not praying. Misha, who converted, was praying,” she said.
By then, she had left her job at the day spa and was giving facials
in her apartment. One client, Alyssa Kilzer, noticed the change when
Tsarnaeva put on a head scarf before leaving the apartment.
“She had never worn a hijab while working at the spa previously,
or inside the house, and I was really surprised,” Kilzer wrote in a
post on her blog. “She started to refuse to see boys that had gone
through puberty, as she had consulted a religious figure and he had
told her it was sacrilegious. She was often fasting.”
Kilzer wrote that Tsarnaeva was a loving and supportive mother, and
she felt sympathy for her plight after the April 15 bombings. But
she stopped visiting the family’s home for spa treatments in late
2011 or early 2012 when, during one session, she “started quoting a
conspiracy theory, telling me that she thought 9/11 was purposefully
created by the American government to make America hate Muslims.”
“It’s real,” Tsarnaeva said, according to Kilzer. “My son knows all
about it. You can read on the Internet.”
In the spring of 2010, Zubeidat’s eldest son got married in a ceremony
at a Boston mosque that no one in the family had previously attended.
Tamerlan and his wife, Katherine Russell, a Rhode Island native and
convert from Christianity, now have a child who is about 3 years old.
Zubeidat married into a Chechen family but was an outsider. She is an
Avar, from one of the dozens of ethnic groups in Dagestan. Her native
village is now a hotbed of an ultraconservative strain of Islam known
as Salafism or Wahabbism.
It is unclear whether religious differences fueled tension in their
family. Anzor and Zubeidat divorced in 2011.
About the same time, there was a brief FBI investigation into Tamerlan
Tsarnaev, prompted by a tip from Russia’s security service.
The vague warning from the Russians was that Tamerlan, an amateur
boxer in the U.S., was a follower of radical Islam who had changed
drastically since 2010. That led the FBI to interview Tamerlan at the
family’s home in Cambridge. Officials ultimately placed his name,
and his mother’s name, on various watch lists, but the inquiry was
closed in late spring of 2011.
After the bombings, Russian authorities told U.S. investigators they
had secretly recorded a phone conversation in which Zubeidat had
vaguely discussed jihad with Tamerlan. The Russians also recorded
Zubeidat talking to someone in southern Russia who is under FBI
investigation in an unrelated case, according to U.S. officials who
spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to
discuss the investigation with reporters.
The conversations are significant because, had they been revealed
earlier, they might have been enough evidence for the FBI to initiate
a more thorough investigation of the Tsarnaev family.
Anzor’s brother, Ruslan Tsarni, told the AP from his home in Maryland
that he believed his former sister-in-law had a “big-time influence”
on her older son’s growing embrace of his Muslim faith and decision
to quit boxing and school.
While Tamerlan was living in Russia for six months in 2012, Zubeidat,
who had remained in the U.S., was arrested at a shopping mall in the
suburb of Natick, Mass., and accused of trying to shoplift $1,624
worth of women’s clothing from a department store.
She failed to appear in court to answer the charges that fall, and
instead left the country.
Seddon reported from Makhachkala, Russia. Associated Press writers
Eileen Sullivan and Matt Apuzzo contributed to this report from
Washington.
From: Baghdasarian