Men who allegedly plotted to kidnap Michigan’s Democratic governor in 2020 sought to buy bombs with “IOUs”, a court has heard.

FBI agent Timothy Bates testified Monday that he had posed undercover as a bomb-maker and infiltrated the plotters’ group.

The group was “excited” to buy bombs, but did not have the funds, he said.

The government says the men are armed extremists who targeted Gretchen Whitmer over her Covid-19 policies.

But lawyers for the four accused argue they were entrapped by the FBI.

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Closing arguments and jury deliberations are expected Friday following a 14-day trial of four men accused of plotting to kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, one of the most closely watched cases of domestic terrorism in recent history.

Testimony ended in federal court in Grand Rapids Thursday with just one of the four defendants testifying. Lake Orion resident Daniel Harris, 24, a Marine, denied joining any conspiracy during and during a combative cross examination, called an FBI informant a “b—-” and the government’s star witnesses “liars.”

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A convicted felon belonging to a US neo-Nazi hate group was paid over $100,000 by the FBI over the course of 18 years for information on the neo-Nazi underworld.

A convicted felon linked to a US neo-Nazi hate group was paid over $100,000 by the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) over the course of 18 years in order to provide information about his fellow group-members, a recent court document has revealed.

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Last Thursday, in a press conference with the Right Side Broadcasting Network outside the United States Capitol on the anniversary of January 6, Reps. Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene spun an increasingly popular conspiracy theory to explain the horrific events that occurred: It was the Feds.

“I’m starting to think this was less of an insurrection and more of a ‘fedsurrection,’” said Gaetz, offering a groan-inducing pun as proof of the seriousness of the allegations.

After months of claiming that rioters were just harmless tourists, or that it was the work of antifa and Black Lives Matter plants, now several Republican members of Congress have pivoted, adopting a spurious claim that it was the FBI, specifically an agent provocateur named Ray Epps. Referred to throughout social media as #FedBoomer or #BigMagaCamo, Epps, these people claim, was a decisive figure in planning, inciting, and directing Trump supporters to storm the Capitol on January 6.

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The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection poked another hole in the pro-Trump conspiracy theory that federal agents orchestrated the attack, confirming on Tuesday that a man at the center of the claims said he’d never been an FBI informant.

Ray Epps, an Arizona man who was filmed encouraging others to enter the U.S. Capitol, testified that he wasn’t “employed by, working with, or acting at the direction of any law enforcement agency on Jan. 5th or 6th or at any other time,” the committee tweeted on Tuesday.

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When Ray Epps, now 61, arrived in Washington DC in early January, 2021, he believed he was answering the call of his president.

Mr Epps was one of the thousands of MAGA loyalists who believed former President Donald Trump’s lie that the 2020 election had been stolen. He also thought he and a throng of conservative allies would protest the election’s certification.

The night before the Capitol riot on Jan 6, Mr Epps told a crowd of fellow Trump supporters that they should enter the Capitol. This exchange was caught on video. He did not call for violence, and later claimed that he was encouraging a peaceful protest inside the building.

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Ray Epps, the former chapter leader of an anti-government militia group who was filmed corralling rioters to the Capitol on Jan. 6 just before the violence erupted, said he intends to sue the public figures who accused him of working with federal authorities that day.

Epps told the New York Times that his life has been “hell” for the past 10 months as prominent members of the media such as Fox News host Tucker Carlson and Republican lawmakers, including Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, and even former President Donald Trump, speculated that he may have agitated people to storm the Capitol at the behest of federal authorities.

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When Ray Epps, now 61, arrived in Washington DC in early January, 2021, he believed he was answering the decision of his president.

Mr Epps was one of many 1000’s of MAGA loyalists who believed former President Donald Trump’s lie that the 2020 election had been stolen. He additionally thought he and a throng of conservative allies would protest the election’s certification.

The night time earlier than the Capitol riot on Jan 6, Mr Epps instructed a crowd of fellow Trump supporters that they need to enter the Capitol. This change was caught on video. He didn’t name for violence, and later claimed that he was encouraging a peaceable protest contained in the constructing.

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Extremist leader repeatedly worked undercover for investigators after his arrest in 2012, former prosecutor and court files reveal

Enrique Tarrio, leader of the far-right group the Proud Boys leader during a march into Freedom Plaza, in Washington DC on 12 December 2020.

Enrique Tarrio, the leader of the Proud Boys extremist group, has a past as an informer for federal and local law enforcement, repeatedly working undercover for investigators after he was arrested in 2012, according to a former prosecutor and a transcript of a 2014 federal court proceeding obtained by Reuters.

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Enrique Tarrio, the leader of the Proud Boys extremist group, has a past as an informer for federal and local law enforcement, repeatedly working undercover for investigators after he was arrested in 2012, according to a former prosecutor and a transcript of a 2014 federal court proceeding obtained by Reuters.

In the Miami hearing, a federal prosecutor, a Federal Bureau of Investigation agent and Tarrio’s own lawyer described his undercover work and said he had helped authorities prosecute more than a dozen people in various cases involving drugs, gambling and human smuggling.

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Agents began to monitor protests groups in the summer of 2020 during the Black Lives Matter demonstrations

Surveillance was stepped up after rioters attacked the Matthew O. Hatfield courthouse in Portland

A federal law enforcement agent was attacked with a hammer during that uprising

Agents continued to observe the protest movement during a raucous demonstration of President Biden’s inaugeration

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In the “Fort Dix Five” case, the Duka brothers were convicted with the help of an FBI informant. Their family is still waiting for justice.

Right up until his death in 2018, Ferik Duka dreamed of seeing his three eldest sons, Shain, Dritan, and Eljvir, freed from prison. In 2009, the three brothers were sentenced to life for their role in an alleged plot to attack the Fort Dix military base in New Jersey. The convictions followed a terrorism sting led by then-U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey Chris Christie that ran for over a year and involved multiple government informants. The brothers’ incarceration put an end to Ferik Duka’s immigrant dream: Decades earlier, he had brought his family to the United States from Albania in search of peace and opportunity.

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Aswad Khan didn’t understand why people were congratulating him. On a February morning in 2017, rolling out of bed at his home in an upper-middle class area of Karachi, Pakistan, Khan saw a flurry of text messages, mostly from old college and high school friends, many living in the United States, that had arrived the night before. They were wishing him well about some good news that he had not yet received. Groggily, he scrolled through his phone and scanned the messages.

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A police intelligence officer fabricated reports about a terrorism informant in a highly classified database after allegedly being instructed to by superiors, The Times has learnt.

The rogue special branch unit, linked with MI5, that the detective constable worked for was disbanded after he retrospectively altered intelligence reports

Phil Moran, a counterterrorism agent handler at British Transport Police (BTP), claimed that he was ordered by his superiors to manipulate information on the National Special Branch Intelligence System to deceive the surveillance watchdog. BTP’s director of intelligence, Detective Superintendent Paul Shrubsole, was dismissed at a secret misconduct hearing and another senior officer retired before disciplinary proceedings were brought. Shrubsole denies any wrongdoing.

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A shocking story of how a special squad of Britain’s Metropolitan Police, in collusion with MI5 – the domestic ‘security’ service – secretly infiltrated hundreds of UK political and campaign groups, and the question of whether the spying continues. As told by Asa Winstanley, who has personal experience.

Op dinsdag 14 september 2021, had ik tussen half 2 en 2 uur twee gemiste oproepen, 7 minuten van elkaar van een mij onbekend mobiel nummer (06XXX64615). Normaal bel ik niet terug als er geen bericht wordt achtergelaten, maar ik was die dag aan het werk en ging ervan uit dat iemand dringend iets werkgerelateerds van mij nodig had.

Het nummer bleek van ene mevrouw Sterrenburg (?), werkzaam bij Binnenlandse Zaken. Ze wilde graag een vertrouwelijk gesprek met mij over wat er speelt in de samenleving, gezien mijn betrokkenheid bij Amelisweerd. Aangezien ze op dat moment ‘in de buurt’ was, zou ze het liefst meteen afspreken. Het werd niet duidelijk of ‘in de buurt’ betekende dat ze in de buurt van Utrecht, Amelisweerd of mijn huis was.

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A former police officer who is now a prominent climate crisis campaigner has accused the Metropolitan police of attempting to recruit him to spy on Extinction Rebellion.

Former detective sergeant Paul Stephens, who joined XR after he retired from the London force in 2018, claims he was approached by an officer he knew near Parliament Square during the group’s campaign of non-violent mass civil disobedience in London in October 2019.

“He asked if I wanted to come on the books – to become a covert human intelligence source [Chis],” Stephens said. “But I turned him down straight away. I joined XR to make those in power do something about climate change, not to spy on peaceful people doing their bit for the planet.”

The Met said it could “neither confirm nor deny any Chis activity in relation to Extinction Rebellion”.

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Documents obtained by The Intercept indicate that the FBI surveilled Black Lives Matter activists — and that the Department of Homeland Security drafted a mysterious “race paper.”

At the height of 2014’s Black Lives Matter protests in Ferguson, Missouri, FBI agents tracked the movements of an activist flying in from New York, and appear to have surveilled the homes and cars of individuals somehow tied to the protests, according to recently released documents provided to The Intercept.

The documents, which include FBI emails and intelligence reports from November 2014, suggest that federal surveillance of Black Lives Matter protests went far beyond the online intelligence-gathering first reported on by The Intercept in 2015. That intelligence-gathering by the federal government had employed open-source information, such as social media, to profile and keep track of activists. The newly released documents suggest the FBI put resources toward running informants, as well as physical surveillance of antiracist activists.

The heavily redacted records were obtained by two civil rights groups, Color of Change and the Center for Constitutional Rights, through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit and are being published here for the first time. Internal communications from Department of Homeland Security officials, released through this lawsuit, also revealed the existence of a document described by DHS officials as the “Race Paper,” which was the subject of a filing by the civil rights groups on Monday.

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Not long after Tamerlan Tsarnaev bombed the Boston Marathon,
investigative reporter Michele McPhee went looking for answers. What she
discovered, detailed in this exclusive excerpt from her new book,
Maximum Harm, might just change how you think about our government and
law enforcement forever.

As darkness descended over the village of Utamysh, Russia, one mid-July
night in 2012, international soldiers, intelligence agents, and local
police made their way inside a convoy of covered troop carriers to a
carefully hidden encampment. They even brought a light-armored tank,
knowing the men inside were heavily armed.

The hideout, a small farmhouse, was home to seven mujahideen, guerrilla
fighters who had all vowed to bring sharia law back to Russia’s Northern
Caucasus. They flew their own nationalist flag and consistently referred
to Russian authorities as “invaders.” Two of the men, however, Islam and
Arsen Magomedov, were more than mere guerrilla insurgents: They were
notorious terrorists and commanders of the region’s most brutal criminal
gangs. In all, they were suspected of orchestrating dozens of murders
and deadly bombings of police checkpoints, civilian-filled trains, and
Russian Federation television stations. Next to the Magomedovs stood
five other men who ranged in age from 25 to 35, budding jihadists who
had very few prospects when they left their families other than to go,
as they said, “into the forests” to train. After a long day, the men
went to bed—completely unaware that just outside the tiny village, under
the cover of night, forces were preparing a raid that would level their
camp.

Russian Interior Ministry counterterrorism troops wanted to move in
without being seen by the prying eyes of Utamysh villagers, so they
evacuated some women and children living near the camp. Not everyone in
the Muslim village supported the continuing carnage in their region, but
most distrusted Russian Federation law enforcement officials. As in most
military operations, the soldiers moved silently as they carefully
checked their guns and grenades, switched the safeties off their
automatic weapons, and even loaded a small rocket-propelled grenade.
They wore combat gear, and not for aesthetic reasons. Inside the hideout
were some of the most violent men in the Northern Caucasus, an area that
has long been among the most volatile and lawless places in the world.
At that time, it was not unusual for a Russian police officer to be
assassinated weekly. The insurgents inside the Utamysh compound had been
trained to believe that the Russians were invaders who—like
pigs—deserved nothing less than slaughter, and had been taught that
there was no greater honor than to die taking a Russian out.

When the radicals heard the sound of dried dirt and rocks being crushed
under the weight of the tank and the troop movers carrying the enemy to
their front door, according to a video that was later released by the
Russian Interior Ministry, the mujahideen grabbed their own guns, prayed
that Allah would give them strength in battle, and fired.

Tracer rounds and bombs lit up the village for hours. When the sun rose
over the mountains on July 14, 2012, all seven of the Islamic militants
were dead. The Russians photographed their slain bodies lying in the
scrubby grass as proof of their deaths.

The camp was a smoldering shell. Cars belonging to the insurgents were
still burning. The walls of the farmhouse were pitted with gunfire, and
its windows had all been blown out. Russian Federation counterterrorism
coalition forces also lost a man: an officer with the Russian Interior
Ministry. Three other Russian agents had been wounded.

As the farmhouse continued to fume, while militants mourned and the
Russian Interior Ministry prepared to bury its dead agent, one man left
the region, somehow paying 2,050 euros for a one-way Aeroflot ticket
from Sheremetyevo International Airport in Moscow to John F. Kennedy
International Airport, and then to Logan airport on July 17, 2012. His
name was Tamerlan Tsarnaev, a Russian expat whose entire family fled the
region a decade earlier for Cambridge, Massachusetts, telling United
States immigration officials that they would be killed because of their
political affiliations if they ever returned home.

It remains unclear how the unemployed 25-year-old on welfare paid for
the flight or exactly what he spent his time in Russia doing, or for
whom. Less than a year later, he and his younger brother, Dzhokhar,
carried out the Boston Marathon bombings, an act of terror so immense it
would paralyze the entire city. Tamerlan would die on April 19, 2013,
not long after a wild firefight with police and a high-speed chase in a
stolen SUV driven by Dzhokhar, who fled the shootout and prompted a
nearly daylong manhunt before being captured.

When Dzhokhar’s trial started nearly two years later, his famed
death-penalty defense attorney, Judy Clarke, startled court spectators
when she flat-out admitted her client was guilty of the bombings. At one
point, she pointed to a photo of older brother Tamerlan and explained,
“There’s little that occurred the week of April the 15th…that we
dispute.” But what about in the months and years before that?

Much is murky about Tamerlan’s life leading up to the deadly attack on
Boylston Street. Four years after the blasts, his case, at first blush,
seems to be an extreme cautionary tale about the shortcomings of the
overbloated war on terror, its divided attentions rendering actual
terrorists invisible. But upon closer inspection, a strange picture
starts to emerge—one that counterterrorism experts and law enforcement
officials have suggested points to Tamerlan having been a federal
informant who went rogue.

During Dzhokhar’s trial, his defense attorneys raised provocative
questions about the FBI’s mysterious involvement with Tamerlan. Had
agents pressured him to be an informant? And if so, did that pressure
play a role in the bombings? “We base this on information from our
client’s family and other sources that the FBI made more than one visit
to talk with [Tamerlan’s parents] Anzor, Zubeidat and Tamerlan,
questioned Tamerlan about his internet searches, and asked him to be an
informant, reporting on the Chechen and Muslim community,” Dzhokhar’s
lawyers stated in court records. “We further have reason to believe that
Tamerlan misinterpreted the visits and discussions with the FBI as
pressure and that they amounted to a stressor that increased his
paranoia and distress. We do not suggest that these contacts are to be
blamed and have no evidence to suggest that they were improper, but
rather view them as an important part of the story of Tamerlan’s
decline. Since Tamerlan is dead, the government is the source of
corroboration that these visits did in fact occur and of what was said
during them.”

The FBI denies that Tamerlan was their informant, but to this day those
questions have not been answered. What is the bureau trying to hide?

***

THE TSARNAEV CONNECTION

2009
Tamerlan Tsarnaev participates in a photo essay titled “Will Box for
Passport.”

March 2011
Russian counterterrorism agents warn the FBI about Tsarnaev.

June 2011
The FBI closes its investigation on Tsarnaev.

September 11, 2011
The bodies of three men with connections to Tsarnaev are found nearly
decapitated in a Waltham apartment.

October 2011
Russian officials warn U.S. intelligence about Tsarnaev’s jihadist
rhetoric; his name is added to two terror watch lists.

January 21, 2012
Despite being watch-listed, Tsarnaev is allowed to fly from New York to
Russia.

July 2012
Radical extremist William Plotnikov and six other rebel fighters are
killed by Russian forces in Dagestan; Tsarnaev leaves Russia, paying
2,050 euros in cash for the flight.

August 28, 2012
Tsarnaev’s naturalized citizen application is reopened.

January 23, 2013
Tsarnaev’s citizenship is delayed once again.

April 15, 2013
Tsarnaev and his brother bomb the Boston Marathon.

***

In 2011, the year before Tamerlan flew from Boston to Moscow, the
Russians were already worried about him and his mother, Zubeidat. So in
an unusual move, the agency shared its concerns with counterterrorism
counterparts in the United States. To say the least, the relationship
between the two countries—both of which were trying to eradicate Islamic
terrorism—was based more on need than trust.

Still, on March 4, 2011, the FSB sent its first message about Tamerlan
and Zubeidat to the FBI’s legal attaché in Moscow. Later, it sent the
same memo to the CIA. While the FBI refuses to release a copy of the
letter, FSB officials read it to a congressional delegation that
included Representative William Keating, a Democrat from Massachusetts
and a former prosecutor. “It was amazing in its detail dealing with
Tamerlan Tsarnaev,” Keating later said.

The letter, according to Keating and others, described intercepted text
messages between Tamerlan, his mother, and Magomed Kartashov, her second
cousin—a former Dagestan police officer who had become a prominent
Islamist and leader of a group called Union of the Just (a Muslim
advocacy group that has been banned in Russia because of its alleged
affiliations with Muslim militants). The organization sympathized with
radical Islamic insurgents who had declared war against Vladimir Putin’s
Russian forces. Zubeidat and Tamerlan, the letter stated, were becoming
adherents of radical Islam.

The FSB also provided full names, addresses, and phone numbers for many
of the members of the Tsarnaev family, including Tamerlan and his
mother. According to the FBI, it warned that Tamerlan “had changed
drastically since 2010” and was preparing to travel to a part of Russia
“to join unspecified underground groups,” namely, violent radical
Islamists in the Caucasus who formed their own bandit groups, which were
essentially ragtag insurgency gangs. The FBI’s legal attaché in Moscow
sent a translated copy of the FSB’s warning concerning Tamerlan to the
Counterterrorism Division of the FBI’s Boston field office, telling them
“to take any investigative steps deemed appropriate and provide [the
legal attaché in] Moscow with any information derived,” with the promise
that the information would be forwarded to the Russians.

After receiving the FSB’s letter, a special agent in that Boston
Counterterrorism Division, referred to in an Office of the Inspector
General (OIG) report as “the CT Agent,” was assigned to conduct what the
FBI called a threat assessment based on the information that the FSB had
shared regarding Tamerlan’s and his mother’s increasing extremism.

In the months before Tamerlan left Boston for Russia, the CT Agent
interviewed Tamerlan and his parents and reported his findings, the OIG
said. The report concluded that there is no public evidence that the CT
Agent contacted Tamerlan’s then-wife (Katherine Russell, also known as
Karima Tsarnaeva)—at the least, notes about any contact with her never
became part of any official file. Nor did the CT Agent visit the
controversial Islamic Society of Boston mosque in Cambridge where
Tamerlan prayed, despite its rumored connections to radical Islamists.
The FBI would later issue a statement that in response to the FSB’s
letter, agents “checked U.S. government databases and other information
to look for such things as derogatory telephone communications, possible
use of online sites associated with the promotion of radical activity,
associations with other persons of interest, travel history and plans,
and education history. The FBI also interviewed Tamerlan Tsarnaev and
family members. The FBI did not find any terrorism activity, domestic or
foreign.” And so the bureau closed its case on Tamerlan in June 2011.

As it turned out, the CT Agent’s investigation into the Tsarnaevs was
never shared with the police in Cambridge, where the Tsarnaevs lived,
nor with the Boston police, which ran the Boston Regional Intelligence
Center. The CT Agent, who could not be reached for comment, didn’t even
share the information with his Joint Terrorism Task Force counterparts
from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). When asked about the CT
Agent, the FBI declined to speak about him or any specific agent. As for
the Russians, the Boston FBI field office sent a letter to the FSB dated
August 8, 2011, through its legal attaché in Moscow, stating that its
agents had found “nothing derogatory” about the Tsarnaevs. Months later,
though, Tamerlan flew to Russia, where he would meet the very men the
FSB had warned American counterterrorism officials about: Tamerlan’s
mother’s cousin, Magomed Kartashov, and William Plotnikov, a notorious
extremist.

In a strange twist, evidence would later show that Tamerlan somehow
clandestinely recorded many of the conversations he had with Kartashov
without his relative’s knowledge—recordings that would eventually be
introduced by Dzhokhar’s attorneys during trial to bolster the defense’s
assertion that the younger brother had come under Tamerlan’s corrupting
influence, just as Tamerlan had sought guidance on jihad back in his
homeland.

On January 21, 2012, Tamerlan departed from Boston’s Logan Airport and
connected at JFK for a flight to Moscow. By then he was on two different
terrorist watch lists, though that fact never slowed him down.

The first was the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE)
database, which is the repository of all international terrorist
identifier information shared by the FBI, CIA, and an alphabet soup of
U.S. intelligence agencies. The National Counterterrorism Center
maintains it by adding biographical or biometric identifiers. The second
watch list was TECS, which is not an acronym but takes its name from an
outdated system of identification checks from a now-defunct federal
agency. TECS, aimed at flagging potential terror suspects as they cross
borders, is a system allowing customs agents to file reports about any
“encounter with a traveler, a memorable event, or noteworthy item of
information particularly when they observe behavior that may be
indicative of intelligence gathering or preoperational planning related
to terrorism, criminal, or other illicit intention,” according to the
DHS. Despite Tamerlan’s being on both of those lists, he still left
Logan without a hitch.

Nearly six months later, upon arrival in the United States after
spending time overseas in a terrorist hot spot, he faced little to no
resistance from U.S. Customs. The purpose of the FBI’s and CIA’s placing
Tamerlan on the watch lists was to create an alert any time he traveled.
But inexplicably, that never happened.

Then there was the question of his passport, which Tamerlan had reported
stolen—or at least that’s what he told his ex-wife, Katherine Russell.
The last valid passport that Tamerlan possessed came from Kyrgyzstan,
where he had grown up, and was slated to expire on November 16, 2012.
Tamerlan applied for a Russian passport to replace the one issued in
Kyrgyzstan that he had used to gain entry into the United States as a
political refugee in 2002. But, as congressional investigators would
discover, he left Russia without ever collecting the new passport.

Still, when Tamerlan landed at Logan on July 17, 2012, he had no problem
whatsoever. A customs agent “scanned Tsarnaev’s Alien Registration Card
into the computer system used during primary inspection. The card was
valid, and as a result, CBP [Customs and Border Protection] took
Tsarnaev’s picture, collected his fingerprints, confirmed his identity,
and admitted him into the country based on his LPR [legal permanent
resident] status,” according to the OIG. However, the report states, the
Customs and Border Protection officer who processed Tamerlan told
investigators he “could not recall” processing Tamerlan or if he alerted
the FBI regarding Tamerlan’s return to the United States without a
passport. He did explain to the inspectors that officers like him
communicate with the FBI about potential terrorist watch list suspects’
travel with “email, orally, or via ‘sticky note.’”

Stranger still was the testimony from then–Homeland Security Secretary
Janet Napolitano during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on
immigration policy on April 23, 2013—just days after Tamerlan died—that
the name on his airline ticket did not match the name on his green card,
saying, “there was a mismatch.” She publicly declined to elaborate.

Surely to stop Tamerlan at the airport for additional screening based on
his physical profile alone—he was a Muslim male with a long beard—or
because he was leaving a terrorist hotbed would have been insensitive
racial profiling. But the idea that a man whose name was on two
terrorist watch lists somehow managed to clear customs because,
government officials claimed, his name was misspelled on those lists, is
inconceivable. This is especially true given the multimillion-dollar
computer program the DHS had purchased to prevent that very sort of
thing from occurring. Even after the Russians had inexplicably notified
the United States in writing about his radicalization in 2011, and
despite being on multiple terror watch lists, Tamerlan was allowed to
travel to a terrorist hot spot and return without being questioned.

All of this looks strange—even stupendously negligent—to the casual
observer. But to the trained eye, it might look like something else
entirely. Former Somerville Police Chief Tom Pasquarello, a longtime DEA
agent who has supervised his own confidential informants, had noticed
similarities between Tamerlan’s case and his own use of so-called CIs
during multiple takedowns all over the world. As a longtime law
enforcement official, he says, the seeming coincidences cannot be
ignored. They make no sense—not Tamerlan’s trip to Russia, nor his
return without a passport while on two separate terror watch lists.
Unless, that is, Tamerlan was trying to lure like-minded radicals in an
effort to collect information and report back to U.S. law enforcement.
“You pull a string on Tamerlan’s life,” Pasquarello said, “and all you
get is unanswered questions.”

The use of Muslim informants has been a controversial topic since 9/11.
Not long after the attack on the World Trade Center, former New York
Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly turned to retired CIA officer David
Cohen to create the Terrorist Interdiction Unit, a secretive squad that
fell under the department’s Intelligence Division. The unit began
recruiting Muslim police officers to go undercover, as well as Muslim
confidential informants who’d been arrested and were willing to
cooperate with the police. NYPD commanders and detectives assigned to
the unit became among the most lauded and aggressive
domestic-intelligence-collecting agencies in the country, coming up with
the term “raker” to describe informants who infiltrated radical Islamist
plots and raked for information. To this day, Kelly credits the unit
with stopping multiple would-be terror attacks across the country. The
unit’s tactics, however, would raise the ire of organizations including
the ACLU, who accused the police department of abusing its powers to
target mosques and infiltrate them with Muslim officers or informants.

In many ways, what the NYPD created was nothing new. The U.S. Department
of Justice began its relationship with cooperating informants in 1961,
when Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy instructed FBI Director J. Edgar
Hoover to order every agent in every field office throughout the country
to infiltrate organized crime groups. The FBI knew it needed to access
the dregs of the underworld in order to bring down its targets, and the
way to do that was to tempt bottom feeders up into the light.

Over time, informants started to pay off as the FBI began toppling the
highest levels of organized crime. Eventually, it had informants inside
the Mafia, the KKK, the Black Panthers, and biker gangs throughout the
country. After 9/11, the bureau focused much of its effort on finding
and maintaining Muslim informants to fight the war on terror. More
recently, informants have infiltrated anarchist groups such as Black
Bloc and Occupy Wall Street.

With the resulting arrests came power for FBI case agents. In some
instances, that power brought unfettered authority to offer sweetheart
deals to turncoats, no matter how treacherous the cooperating informant
was. The FBI tracks the productivity of its informants by aggregating
their “statistical accomplishments”—that is, the number of indictments,
convictions, search warrants, and other contributions to investigative
objectives for which the informant gets credit. But what the FBI does
not track are agents who let informants run amok.

Boston has an especially fraught history with this. Entire FBI field
offices have been tainted, as in the case with infamous mobster James
“Whitey” Bulger. Bulger’s FBI handler was John Connolly, who had admired
the rough-and-tumble mobster while growing up in the same South Boston
housing development. Connolly’s boss was John Morris. Both men took
bribes, and Connolly is now serving time in a Florida prison for
allowing Bulger to set up mob-style hits on innocent people, while the
agents made a name for themselves arresting Italian and Italian-American
mobsters whom Bulger was trying to put out of business. Connolly went so
far as to alert Bulger to an indictment pending against him. As a result
of that tip, the mobster went on the lam with his companion, Catherine
Greig, for 16 years. Then there was notorious mob captain Mark Rossetti,
a feared enforcer who ran his criminal enterprise of drugs and
loansharking out of East Boston. It was only after the Essex County
district attorney indicted more than two dozen mobsters that Rossetti’s
secret work as an FBI informant was exposed.

Despite these high-profile scandals, the FBI informant program is still
in widespread use—and Muslim informants make up a large part of it.
During the height of Hoover’s Cointelpro operations in the 1960s and
1970s, for instance, the FBI had roughly 1,500 total informants. In the
1980s and 1990s the drug wars brought that number up to about 6,000.
Then, after 9/11, the FBI recruited so many new informants—including
accused criminals looking for leniency, liars looking for immigration
favors, Muslims looking for revenge on the members of competing Islamic
sects, and narcissistic egomaniacs who wanted to be revered as a Jason
Bourne–type figure—that it had to hire an outside software company to
help agents track their secret spies. Today, there are anywhere from
15,000 to 20,000 snitches on the FBI’s payroll, and many of them inform
on fellow Muslims in the United States and overseas. The vaunted NYPD
Intelligence Division—working alongside members of the NSA, CIA, and
FBI, as well as Muslim patriots—have uncovered jihadi-inspired plots
that led to multiple criminal prosecutions.

In February 2016, Homeland Security alerted 29 “high-target” cities,
including Boston and New York, that their DHS funding would be slashed
by 1.3 percent. Boston, which had received $18 million from the federal
government earmarked for homeland security initiatives in fiscal year
2015, received $17.7 million in fiscal year 2016. Rene Fielding, chief
of Boston’s Office of Emergency Management, explained that the cuts
collected from the cities would be used to fund “nonprofits”—primarily
to provide security to mosques and synagogues.

Privately, though, police officials complained that it was a way for DHS
officials to pay imams at mosques for goodwill. The feds needed to make
nice with angry activists who were part of the Council on
American-Islamic Relations, the reasoning went, and grant money goes a
long way with nonprofits.

Sometimes, though, the program backfired and inadvertently turned
informants into radicals. According to a report issued by Human Rights
Watch and the Human Rights Institute at Columbia University Law School,
“Indeed, in some cases the Federal Bureau of Investigation may have
created terrorists out of law-abiding individuals by conducting sting
operations that facilitated or invented the target’s willingness to act.
According to multiple studies, nearly 50 percent of the more than 500
federal counterterrorism convictions resulted from informant-based
cases; almost 30 percent of those cases were sting operations in which
the informant played an active role in the underlying plot.”

The ACLU has filed several civil lawsuits against New York City and the
NYPD saying that the Terrorist Interdiction Program started by Kelly
used unconstitutional methods that essentially coerced Muslims to inform
on their neighbors. Both Kelly, a Harvard University graduate, and his
successor, William Bratton, a longtime Boston police commissioner,
insisted the program was essential to stopping planned attacks.
Meanwhile, the NYPD released a 2007 report, titled Radicalization in the
West: The Homegrown Threat, stating that some of the warning signs
someone was becoming radicalized included changes in appearance and
behavior, and cited “wearing traditional Islamic clothing [and] growing
a beard,” abstaining from alcohol, and “becoming involved in social
activism.” In response, the ACLU argued that infiltrating mosques and
hookah bars was illegal and that the NYPD’s “purported rationale for
this unconstitutional surveillance” was nonsense.

Nevertheless, those warning signs had certainly been observed in
Tamerlan.

While living in Cambridge, Tamerlan underwent a transformation from a
womanizing Euro-trash party boy to a pious Muslim, albeit one who first
showed signs of radicalization in 2010. He stopped drinking and doing
drugs. He traded his designer clothes for traditional Muslim robes,
wearing them to pizza parlors and Starbucks shops. He started attending
the Islamic Society of Boston’s Cambridge mosque, which was initially
incorporated in 1982 by Muslim students from MIT, Harvard, and other
area colleges. Its first president listed on state records is Abdurahman
M. Alamoudi, who is currently serving a 23-year federal prison sentence
related to charges of funneling money to Libya. By the time Tamerlan
began attending regularly, the mosque had long faced rumors of ties to
extremists.

Tamerlan had all the traits that comprised the perfect candidate to
infiltrate a mosque that had been in the crosshairs of federal
counterterrorism investigators, law enforcement officials in
Massachusetts say privately. He was multilingual. He had tentacles in
the drug and mixed martial arts worlds. And he was just the type who
could help the fight against terrorism overseas in one of the most
dangerous regions for Islamic extremists: his Mother Russia.

When Tamerlan flew to Moscow in 2012, his name should have been flagged
at Logan airport. After all, he was on the TIDE and TECS terrorist watch
lists. His travel documents included an American permanent resident
alien card that had been issued to him in 2007 and a passport issued in
Kyrgyzstan in 2002 when he was 16, which would expire that year. He
wasn’t stopped at JFK for additional screening, and he wasn’t stopped
when he arrived in Moscow as a suspected terrorist.

Among his Dagestani relatives and members of his Russian mosque,
Tamerlan “looked like an American.” His cousin Magomed Kartashov had
grown up across the street from Tamerlan’s great-grandmother and had
known the Tsarnaev family when Tamerlan and Dzhokhar were young
children. He hadn’t seen either boy in years until Tamerlan showed up in
the Kizlyar region to visit relatives.

Kartashov did not recognize his cousin, but they quickly embraced.
Tamerlan was wearing a long raincoat and glasses, Kartashov later
recalled to the FBI in June 2013 at the FSB offices in Dagestan while he
was being jailed for allegedly supporting terrorism, according to court
records. Kartashov remembered he hadn’t seen Tamerlan since he was about
10, and that he’d grown up to be a “big guy.”

Tamerlan didn’t wait long to ask Kartashov for help achieving the goal
that had brought him to Russia. According to Kartashov, Tamerlan said
that he wanted to go into the forests, and that he wanted to go to
Syria. “I came here to get involved in jihad,” Tamerlan said.

At first, it sounded like boasting from a spoiled westerner. But
Tamerlan told Kartashov that he had followed Islamic teachings that
urged Muslims to follow orders such as “cut their heads and make them
kneel in front of you.” Kartashov said Tamerlan didn’t know what he was
talking about and took these words too literally. However, investigators
believe this is what happened to three men in Waltham months earlier,
all mixed martial arts fighters who called Tamerlan a friend. While the
case led investigators to Ibragim Todashev, a Russian with ties to
Tamerlan who was shot dead by FBI agents under murky circumstances
during an interview in Florida, the murders remain unsolved.

From the outside, Tamerlan’s familial relationship with radicals in
Russia would’ve made him the perfect FBI recruit. As would his
connections to Muslim drug traffickers and budding Islamists who, on the
highest of Muslim holidays in August 2012, posed in front of a black
flag often associated with jihad. Law enforcement officials in
Massachusetts later began to say that Tamerlan was an informant for the
feds, a spy sent to Russia to help track and kill the men with whom he
was in contact. Some believed that he was working for the U.S.
government, motivated by the promise of citizenship.

Tamerlan was desperate to become an American. In 2009, he even posed in
a photo essay that read, “Will Box for Passport.” He’d wanted to compete
in the Olympic Games on the U.S. boxing team, for which only citizens
were eligible, and trained hard. But he destroyed any chance he might
have had when police arrested him on a domestic violence charge—an
offense of moral turpitude that legally made him ineligible for
citizenship for the next five years. And yet, within weeks of his return
from Russia, where many of the men he had been spotted with had been
tracked and killed by Russian counterterrorism forces, Tamerlan’s case
for citizenship was mysteriously reopened.

When Janet Napolitano was grilled about security lapses in Tamerlan’s
case at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on immigration in April
2013, she admitted that the name on his travel document did not match
the name on his identification. Napolitano, clearly frazzled, said that
a misspelling allowed him to leave the country but that redundancies in
the DHS computer system alerted U.S. authorities to be aware of his
return. But, she said, by the time he came back to the United States six
months later, the FBI alert on him had expired, so his reentry was not
noted. “The system pinged when he was leaving the United States,”
Napolitano testified. “By the time he returned, all investigations had
been—the matter had been closed.” The response, many believe, was
laughable. One federal agent not authorized to speak publicly explained
it this way: “His time overseas should have triggered a secondary
inspection for a number of reasons: immigration status, duration out of
the country, area of travel, and the fact that he was watch-listed.”

U.S. Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat from Connecticut, pushed
Napolitano for more answers and was told to wait for a
classified—secret—briefing. Senator Charles Grassley asked Napolitano
how a misspelling could have caused problems in 2012 when the
Implementing Recommendations of the 9/11 Commission Act of 2007 had
amended certain sections of the Immigration and Naturalization Act
pertaining to the control of foreign nationals’ travel. The 2007 law
reiterated the need for exit data and required that such data be
collected on all foreign nationals who entered the United States under
the visa waiver program with the provision that air carriers are
required to “collect and electronically transmit” passenger “arrival and
departure” data to “the automated entry and exit control system”
developed by the federal government. Clearly, according to Napolitano’s
testimony, that didn’t happen. Inexplicably, once again she was only
willing to answer behind closed doors. It would be better, Napolitano
told the senators at the hearing, if they could discuss the matter in a
classified setting.

Whatever information Tamerlan’s immigration records contained, the DHS
secretary was not at liberty to talk. It was a staggering admission,
especially since DHS would eventually be forced to release Tamerlan’s
alien file pursuant to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by
multiple news organizations, including the Boston Globe, in February
2016. Though dozens of pages were completely redacted, including the
names of federal agencies that requested Tamerlan receive U.S.
citizenship (and waive any fees for the application process), the U.S.
Customs file still contained troubling information.

First, Tamerlan had multiple names and dates of birth that he had used.
Then there were the two State Department Medical Examination for
Immigration or Refugee Applicant forms, which had startling
discrepancies. In one, the attached picture was of an unidentified
older-looking man wearing a black-collared polo shirt and contained a
passport number. In the second, the picture was of a teenage Tamerlan
wearing an identical shirt, and the passport number had been redacted.

Another troubling form seemed innocuous at first glance: a notification
instructing Tamerlan to report to 170 Portland Street in Boston on
October 16, 2012, so he could finally take the official oath and become
an American citizen. Even though Tamerlan was legally ineligible,
somehow his naturalization application had been reopened on August 28,
2012. Among other things, the October ceremony would have meant an
impossibly short turnaround for an application opened just months
earlier. It remains unclear whether Tamerlan showed up at 170 Portland
Street and what happened if he did show up. But the document suggests
that someone was pulling strings to help him obtain the very thing he
had been craving so desperately for years.

Tamerlan did not become a citizen on that October day, though the DHS
will not say whether he attended. What is clear, however, is that in the
weeks after that scheduled appearance, the FBI continued to email
immigration officials, prodding them to approve Tamerlan’s citizenship
application, according to the Office of the Inspector General’s report.
Janet Napolitano, though, would not stick around to answer questions.
She quit her job at the DHS months after the Boston Marathon bombings,
right around the same time FBI Director Robert Mueller retired, as did
the Boston FBI special agent in charge, Richard DesLauriers.

On October 22, 2012—days after the scheduled oath ceremony for Tamerlan
was somehow scuttled—an immigration services officer emailed the FBI’s
CT Agent saying that Tamerlan’s name had popped up on a terrorist watch
list and asking if he “represented a national security concern.” The
next day, the CT Agent, who investigated the initial Russian FSB warning
in 2011, assured immigration officials in writing that Tamerlan was not
a risk if he gained full citizenship: “There is no national security
concern related to [Tamerlan Tsarnaev] and nothing that I know of that
should preclude issuance of whatever is being applied for,” he wrote.
The CT Agent would tell officials that he did not remember whether he
searched Tamerlan’s file or public sources before he replied to the
immigration official. To this day, the FBI insists that Tamerlan’s case
file was closed after the CT Agent’s initial investigation in 2011, and
was only reopened after the Boston Marathon attack.

On January 23, 2013, Tamerlan made a second attempt to become a U.S.
citizen. He had an interview with Customs officials to discuss
documentation related to his arrest for domestic violence and fully
expected to walk away with his citizenship. Instead, the officer wrote,
the paperwork relating to the dismissal of charges in his domestic
violence arrest did not arrive and his status was delayed.

Again.

Two weeks later, on February 6, 2013, an angry Tamerlan walked into
Phantom Fireworks in Seabrook, New Hampshire, and asked for the “biggest
and loudest” pyrotechnics in the store.

Michele McPhee’s book Maximum Harm will be released April 4 by ForeEdge,
an imprint of University Press of New England.

By Michele McPhee
Boston Magazine | April 2017

Find this story at 9 April 2017

copyright http://www.bostonmagazine.com/

Last May, a weird story made the news: the FBI killed a guy in Florida who was loosely linked to the Boston Marathon bombings. He was shot seven times in his living room by a federal agent. What really happened? Why was the FBI even in that room with him? A reporter spent six months looking into it, and she found that the FBI was doing a bunch of things that never made the news. Her Boston Magazine story.

This story was reported by Susan Zalkind in a collaboration with Boston Magazine. Check out Susan’s print story for more about the murders in Waltham, MA, and the investigation into Ibragim Todashev.

PROLOGUE

Ira explains that in May 2013, the FBI shot a guy named Ibragim Todashev in his living room in Florida. Supposedly, right before he died, Todashev implicated himself in a crime, a pretty gruesome one, a triple murder of three drug dealers in Waltham Massachusetts, a Boston suburb. Law enforcement officials told reporters that he also named one of the alleged Boston Marathon bombers – Tamerlan Tsarnaev – as his accomplice in the crime. And then, right before he signed a confession, he supposedly freaked out, and an FBI agent shot him. Which is weird in itself. But weirder still is the fact that the FBI has been silent about what happened. They first promised an investigation on this last May. And since then, we’ve heard that it’s coming, but nine months later it hasn’t arrived. So many questions remain: what happened during that interrogation that led to them shooting Ibragim Todashev? If they had such good evidence connecting him to these murders, why didn’t they just arrest him? What evidence did they have? How good is the evidence connecting the alleged Boston bomber to the murders? Do they truly know who committed the triple murders? In the absence of solid information, conspiracy theories sprang up. Some people started to believe the FBI was hiding something. (7 minutes)

ACT ONE

Susan Zalkind spent six months investigating all this for Boston Magazine and This American Life. And she has a personal connection to the 2011 triple murder. She knew one of the three drug dealers who were killed: Erik Weissman was a friend of hers. In this half of the show, she explains what happened when she reached out to people who might have information on Ibragim Todashev, the man killed by the FBI in Florida. First his girlfriend Tatiana Gruzdeva and then his best friend Khusen Taramov are more or less kicked out of the country by federal authorities. Tatiana says she was told she was deported specifically because she spoke with Susan for a story. (17 minutes)
Susan Zalkind

ACT TWO

Susan’s investigation continues, and she tells the story of a third person who was close to Ibragim Todashev who was whisked out of the United States thanks after actions by the FBI. (20 minutes)
Susan Zalkind

ACT THREE

Susan lays out her theory of what the truth is in this case. And she explains what we still don’t know. (14 minutes)

MAR 7, 2014

Find this story at 7 March 2014

© 1995 – 2014 Chicago Public Media & Ira Glass

Names you know… Dhovar Tsarnev and Tamerlen Tsarnaev… Two young Chechen born brothers, raised in the United States, radicalized through the internet, and responsible for the deadly Boston Bombing attack.

That is the story media has told you but what about the story they have all but ignored? About another Chechen with a lesser known name. Who is Ibragim Todashev and why was he killed by the FBI during an interrogation over the Tsarnev brothers?

Today, you will hear from the widow of that man, and the questions she is still waiting to have answered.

The first step toward truth is to be informed.

As I said, it is a name most americans don’t know at all Ibragim Todashev. A 34 year-old Chechen, living in Orlando, Florida and friend of Boston bombing suspect Tamerlen Tsarnev.

Here is the story.

On May 22nd of this year, FBI agents and Massachusetts state police officers showed up in Orlando florida to interview Todashev.

Before moving to Orlando, Todashev lived in Massachusetts. He was a mixed martial arts fighter and through that sport, became friends with boston bombing suspect Tamerlen Tsarnev.
That was why, only weeks after the bombings, the FBI went to meet with Todashev. but it was during that interrogation when something went terribly wrong

According to a statement released by the FBI,

“The agent, two Massachusetts State Police troopers, and other law enforcement personnel were interviewing an individual in connection with the Boston Marathon bombing investigation when a violent confrontation was initiated by the individual. During the confrontation, the individual was killed and the agent sustained non-life threatening injuries.”

So what violent confrontation took place? Media reports were all over the place on what happened. The New York Times claimed that Todashev pulled a knife on the agent. Other media claimed it was a samurai sword and then metal pole, some said a broom stick. That is, until
the Washington Post was told by an unnamed law enforcement source that Todashev had neither a knife or gun, that he was completely unarmed but did lunge at the agent.

Who saw this happen?

Another important question. Because according to the FBI, who is doing an internal investigation, immediately prior to the killing, after hours of interrogation, all of the other interrogators withdrew and left the room, leaving the FBI agent who fired the shots alone with Todashev.

That agent, claims that Todashev was about to sign a confession to his involvement along with Tamerlen Tsarnev in an unsolved triple murder in Massachusetts and it was just before he was going to sign that confession that he attacked.

The ex-wife of Todashev spoke to me via Skype.

Ben: “What do you make of the claim that all the agents left him and only the agent who killed Ibragim remained in the room with him?”

Reni: “We still don’t know what exactly happened, how many were in there when he was shot. It is still not clear, they are not telling us anything. So far we know it was three of them when they started the interrogation of them but who was in there when he was shot, we still don’t know.”

Aside from the very strange details surrounding an FBI agent left alone with a suspect, who then must defend himself and kill that suspect, are these details.

The agent who shot and killed Todashev, reportedly shot him 7 times including in the head and chest. I say reportedly, because on July 8th, the autopsy report on Ibragim Toashev was finalized and ready for release. According to the Orlando medical examiners office forensic records coordinator,

“The FBI has informed this office that the case is still under investigation and not to release this document.”

All of which is not only unusual, but the entire investigation so far has been surrounded by secrecy. Another issue that the FBI has not even addressed is that while the claim was that Todashev attempted to attack the agent, friends and his ex-wife claim that Todashev was recovering from knee surgery.

Ben: “You say that Ibragim was recovering from knee surgery, so what was the injury and how bad was that knee?”

Reni: “He had done his surgery in the middle of march. For a month and a half he was still on crutches. He was still limping, he was still in pain and with a light touch to his knee, he would feel the pain. He was still in pain on the knee, he was still walking and limping on the knee.”

Ben: “Is it true that he was on crutches at the time that he was killed?”

Reni: “Not necessarily. He was on them sometimes and when he would feel the pain he would go and get the crutches.”

Ben: “Obviously it is speculation on your part but why do you believe that Ibragim was killed?”

Reni: “He got 7 shots and one of them was the back of the head. Clearly this was an execution.”

Ben: “How do you know that one was to the back of the head?”

Reni: “Because I saw the body.”

Ben: “How do you know that it was an entry wound and not an exit wound for the bullet?”

Reni: “I can’t tell, I’m not a professional but from what I see and the medical examiner in Orlando says that he had 7 shots, 1 in the back of the head.”

Ben: “The medical examiner told you?”

Reni: “Yes, they have told me from day one when I came to sign for the body and to take it.”

Ben: “And he told you that he was shot in the back of the head? Incredible.”

Reni: “He said that he had 7 shots, 1 in the head, 3 in the heart, 1 in the liver and I believe that 1 was somewhere in the shoulder or in the arm.”

What you need to know, is that while the ACLU has requested an independent investigation in Florida and Massachusetts, both those requests have been rejected by law enforcement, saying that it would be inappropriate.

Meanwhile, CAIR in Florida is reporting that a friend of Todashev, was arrested in September and was denied a lawyer for 6 days. That even though he repeatedly requested to speak with an attorney, the FBI agents allegedly responded, “That is not happening.”

CAIR-Florida Civil Rights Director Thania Diaz Clevenger said in a statement.

“It fits the pattern of abuse and troubling behavior by FBI agents beginning in the days prior to the killing of the unarmed Ibragim Todashev. One can only wonder if Mr. Todashev was denied his rights to legal council during the questioning that ultimately resulted in his death.”

In addition, other Chechen friends of Todashev say they are being pressured by the FBI to spy on friends and neighbors. The story here that media just won’t cover is the incredible secrecy surrounding this young man’s death, the fact that he was killed so brutally during an interrogation and to so many people its not even that big of a deal because he might be connected to a terrorist.

Ben Swann Nov 14, 2013

Find this story at 14 November 2013

© Ben Swann 2014

Waltham, September 11, 2011: Three men, throats slit, cash and drugs left on the bodies. Two years later, two dead suspects: Tamerlan Tsarnaev, and a friend who the FBI says was about to confess. One haunting question: Could solving this case have prevented the Boston Marathon bombings?

waltham-triple-homocide

It’s nearly midnight in a nondescript condo complex a few blocks from Universal Studios in Orlando, and Tatiana Gruzdeva has been crying all day. Though neither of us knows it yet, as she sits on the corner of her bed and sobs in tiny convulsions, the fact that she’s talking to me will lead to her being arrested by federal agents, placed in solitary confinement, and deported back to Russia.

Next to us on the bed are nine teddy bears. Eight of them came with her from Tiraspol, Moldova. The ninth was a gift from her boyfriend, Ibragim Todashev. Today would have been Ibragim’s 28th birthday, but he is not here to see it, because in the early hours of May 22, 2013, a Boston FBI agent shot and killed him in this very apartment, under circumstances so strange that a Florida state prosecutor has opened an independent investigation. According to the FBI, just before Ibragim was shot—seven times, in two bursts, including once in the top of the head—he was about to write a confession implicating himself and alleged Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev in a brutal triple homicide that took place in Waltham, Massachusetts, in September 2011.

I’m sitting awkwardly at one end of the twin bed. She’s crying quietly, cross-legged at the other end, wearing shorts and a white shirt with sequins. Most of her outfits have sequins or rhinestones. She’s 19. I’m 26. We both have long blond hair. We’ve both been close to men who were in trouble with the law, and lost them violently. We’ve been talking for about an hour, mostly about men, and parties, and moving forward after a tragedy. Ibragim was a good man, she says. He could never have committed a murder.

“I’m here alone,” she cries. “I hope it never can be worse than this.”

I try to comfort her, but it’s complicated. We both want to know why Ibragim Todashev was killed. She wants to clear his name. For me, and for the families of the Waltham murder victims, Ibragim’s shooting may have snuffed out the last chance at finding out what really happened that night. In the back of my mind is this question: Did her dead boyfriend kill my friend Erik?

September 11, 2011 was a Sunday, and at twilight Erik Weissman was looking for somewhere to spend the night. That afternoon he’d visited his younger sister Aria at a diner down the street from their parents’ home, but he didn’t have a place of his own—he’d been couch-surfing since the cops busted him on drug charges back in January. He kept his belongings at his friend Brendan Mess’s apartment on a dead-end street in Waltham, and that’s where he usually stayed. Erik and Brendan were established pot dealers who occasionally worked together and shared an interest in sports, personal fitness, and designer weed. But Erik had cleared out of the apartment while Brendan was going through a dramatic breakup with his live-in girlfriend, Hiba Eltilib. He had recently been staying with a friend in Newton. “That chick is crazy,” Erik had repeatedly told the friend.

That night his friend in Newton was busy, so around 7:30 p.m. Erik drove his Mercedes SUV back to Brendan’s place in Waltham. It was a warm night, cloudless. Brendan and Hiba had finally broken up, and Hiba had split for Florida, so the coast was clear. Brendan had invited another friend, Rafi Teken, to come over, too. Like Erik, Rafi had been avoiding Brendan’s place while Hiba was there. Rafi and Hiba were known to get into arguments of their own.

At 7:30, Erik sent a text to his friend in Newton. Shortly thereafter, all three men stopped answering their phones.

The bodies were found the next day. Erik was 31. Brendan was 25. Rafi was 37.

It was Hiba who found them, of all people. On September 12, she returned unexpectedly from Florida—most of Brendan’s friends were under the impression that she wasn’t coming back—and after she couldn’t reach Brendan on her cell phone, she showed up at the apartment and asked the landlord to open the door. The bodies were inside. One news report says that Hiba left the house and screamed, “They’re all dead!” Another says she went outside, crying, with blood on her feet, and calmly asked for a cigarette.

Their throats had been slashed with such force that their heads were nearly decapitated. A veteran Waltham investigator called it “the worst bloodbath I have ever seen,” and compared the victims’ wounds to “an Al-Qaeda training video.” About a pound and a half of high-grade marijuana covered two of the corpses. Rafi Teken’s face was left untouched. Erik Weissman had a bloody lip. But Brendan Mess, an experienced mixed martial artist who trained in jujitsu, had real fighting wounds. His arms were covered in scratch marks. He had puncture marks on his temple and the top of his head, another mark by his ear, and he was bruised around the lips. It didn’t scan like a robbery: There were eight and a half pounds of pot left in bags and glass jars, and $5,000 dollars left on the bodies—enough for a cheap funeral, for one of them.

Hours later, Middlesex County District Attorney Gerry Leone stood amid a scrum of reporters on the dead-end street outside Brendan’s home at 12 Harding Avenue. State police had found a “very graphic crime scene” in the second-floor apartment, he said. “It does not appear to be a random act.” He told reporters that there was no evidence of a break-in—that it was likely the assailants and dead men knew one another. Assailants, plural? a reporter asked. Leone replied that there were “at least two people who are not in the apartment now, who were there earlier.”

“This is a fluid, ongoing investigation,” he said. “We will have information as we develop the facts.”

But they didn’t.

ibragim-todashev-autopsy
FROM TOP LEFT, PICTURES RELEASED BY IBRAGIM TODASHEV’S FATHER SHOW HIS WOUNDS—BULLET HOLES IN HIS TORSO AND THE TOP OF HIS HEAD—AS WELL AS THE BLOODY SCENE AT HIS ORLANDO APARTMENT.

From the beginning, investigators failed to follow up on seemingly obvious leads. They didn’t visit the gym where Brendan trained, and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, one of Brendan’s best friends, was never questioned—even though several of Brendan’s friends say they gave his name to the police. Ten days after the murders, a state police detective essentially told one victim’s mother that investigators were waiting for the case to solve itself.

It would take 18 months and two homemade bombs before FBI investigators exhumed the case—and once they did, they were able to move with uncanny speed. It took them mere hours to link Tamerlan to the Waltham triple homicide. The day after Tamerlan was killed in a shootout with Watertown police, plainclothes FBI agents detained his friend, Ibragim Todashev, at gunpoint. Although the FBI seems to have initially been looking for evidence of a wider terrorist cell in connection with the marathon bombings, within weeks its agents were questioning Ibragim about the Waltham murders. According to the FBI, agents were able to bring Ibragim to the brink of a written confession by pressuring him with circumstantial evidence.

If you believe the FBI’s account, then you must also believe this: If Waltham police had figured out who hacked three men to death on September 11, 2011, there’s a good chance we would not be talking about the Boston Marathon bombings. Tamerlan Tsarnaev and Ibragim Todashev might be alive and in jail. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev might be just another mop-headed, no-name stoner at UMass Dartmouth. There would be no One Fund. Krystle Campbell, Lu Lingzi, and Martin Richard would still be alive. Sean Collier would have graduated from the MIT police department to the Somerville Police Department by now. And for the friends and family of the three men who died in Waltham, perhaps their grief would not still be paired with such haunting questions.

I met Erik Weissman in the summer of 2006, after my freshman year of college. I was 19. He was 26. He’d come to sell us some high-end weed. I was with my friends from high school in a Newton attic, and it felt less like a drug deal than a Tupperware party. Erik had spotless sneakers, wire-rimmed nerd glasses, and a contagious smile. He produced a series of glass jars from a black duffel bag, each filled with a different strain of headies: Blue Dream, Grand Daddy, Alaskan Thunder Fuck. My friends were easily impressed; I teased him for talking game. My father, Norman Zalkind, is a criminal defense lawyer, and I grew up discussing his cases and clients at the kitchen table.

A few days later, Erik picked me up and we drove around in his blue Audi, taking turns playing Lil Wayne and Buju Banton on our iPods and smoking Erik’s Sour Diesel. We did that a few times that summer: driving aimlessly, talking, smoking. He was one of the few friends who encouraged my cheesy freshman-year poetry. He thought of himself as an entrepreneur and a connoisseur of pot; he would fly to Amsterdam regularly to buy seeds of a particular variety that interested him. He talked about selling pot as if it were a community service, and told me repeatedly that he didn’t operate in violent circles. I told him about my father and his clients. I told him his line of work always ends badly. He laughed.

Over time I stopped smoking pot, and we grew apart. The last I heard from him was sometime in January or February of 2011. He wanted my father’s number. He’d been busted when his landlord went into his apartment, saw his stash, and called the cops. Boston police had seized more than $20,000 in cash and tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of marijuana from his Roslindale home. He had always told me that he sold only pot, but in the raid police also seized cocaine, Vicodin, and OxyContin.

I gave him the number for my dad’s law firm. He sounded scared.

Soon after my dad took me out for oysters to thank me for the referral. He told me there was a problem with Erik’s warrant, and he didn’t think the case would go to trial.

I never spoke to Erik again.

There was a lot about him I learned only after his death. The drugs and money he lost when he was arrested left him $50,000 in debt to his Sour Diesel connection in California, his friends told me. He’d invested in a California bong company called Hitman Glass, but his money woes kept him from moving out West. In the months before they died, Erik and Brendan were working together to expand their pot business, trying to buy in larger quantities and purchasing equipment to grow marijuana on their own, according to another dealer who sometimes worked with them.

Waltham is often described as a small, quiet, suburban town, but in 2011 it was teeming with much bigger drug operations. A few months before the murders, federal investigators indicted a steroid-popping Syrian national named Safwan Madarati, the Waltham-based head of a violent international drug ring. Madarati, the indictment revealed, hired thugs to assault and intimidate his enemies, and maintained “personal connections with members of the Watertown police department.” A former Watertown officer was among those charged in the case. In an unrelated case only a few months later, police arrested a former Watertown council member after they found $2 million worth of hydroponic pot in his Waltham warehouse. They were all convicted.

Police quickly seized on Erik and Brendan’s pot dealing, and theorized that the murders must have been connected to a drug dispute or robbery. “Whose toes were they stepping on in Waltham?” one friend remembers being asked. Investigators grilled the victims’ friends about Erik and Brendan’s drug sources, and asked with whom they had financial disputes. “They were telling us that it could’ve been a drug deal that had gone wrong,” recalled Bellie Hacker, Erik’s mother. “But then it didn’t make sense because there was money left behind, and the marijuana.”

For Bellie, the aftermath of the murder was excruciating. In addition to the cops’ theory about a drug deal gone wrong, there were other dark rumors circulating, some of them concerning Brendan’s ex-girlfriend, Hiba. “One of the theories was that Hiba hired someone to kill Brendan and just Erik and Rafi were there and they got killed, too,” Bellie said. According to news reports, police questioned Hiba on several occasions. Before dropping out of sight, she gave anonymous interviews to the New York Times and the Boston Globe disavowing any involvement in the crime. Bellie didn’t know what to believe. “Nothing really made sense,” she said.

It didn’t help that police seemed to save their toughest questions for the victims’ families and friends. A few days after the murders, Erik’s sister, Aria, learned that her brother had kept a storage unit, and called the company to ask if she could get access to Erik’s belongings. They didn’t call back, and instead she got a hostile phone call from a detective, State Trooper Erik Gagnon, assigned to the Middlesex County DA’s office. What did she think she was going to find in that box? Gagnon asked. Drugs? Money? She remembers that Gagnon called her “deceitful” and threatened to prosecute her for interfering with the investigation. “How many murders have you solved?” he barked. (When I asked Gagnon about the conversation, he wouldn’t comment on it directly, but said, “If someone said I was being accusatory, maybe ask them why.”)

Friends of Erik’s who spoke to the police after his murder had similar experiences. One friend, who did not have a police record, told me he was questioned by detectives just hours after carrying Erik’s casket at his funeral. “They were treating us less like friends and more like drug dealers,” he said.

Then there were leads that the detectives seemed to ignore. They never visited the Wai Kru gym in Allston, where Brendan practiced mixed martial arts several times a week, according to gym owner John Allan. They never spoke to his training partner and best friend, Golden Gloves champion Tamerlan Tsarnaev, even though several friends gave the police his name in a list of Brendan’s closest contacts. Meanwhile, detectives called Aria into the police station and accused her of knowing who killed her brother. She broke down in tears as her mother defended her.

Ten days after the bodies were found, detectives told Bellie that they were not actively pursuing leads in her son’s murder. Instead, she remembers state police detectives explaining, they were waiting for a suspect to shake loose. “They were basically waiting for someone to come forward and say who did it,” Bellie recalled. “They said, ‘Someday down the line, someone is going to need a plea bargain.’”

It was September 22, 2011. The case would go cold for 582 days.

There was a time, just after the bombs went off on Boylston Street, when it looked like the families might finally get some answers about who killed Rafi, Brendan, and Erik. On April 19, media outlets made the connection between Tamerlan and Brendan. Friends recalled that Tamerlan had acted differently after Brendan’s death, and hadn’t attended his memorial service. John Allan, the owner of Wai Kru gym, recalled approaching Tamerlan to offer his condolences, only to have Tamerlan laugh him off.

Bellie was hopeful that the renewed attention would stir something up. “It got international news, everyone found out about it, the whole world knew about it, and someone will get the fire under their tush, and we’ll start really getting some answers,” she remembers thinking.

A few days after the Watertown manhunt, Aria says, she spoke to Gagnon for the first time since 2011. He asked for her brother’s cell-phone number and the name of the gym Brendan Mess went to. The Middlesex County DA’s office had Boston cops send over the files from Erik Weissman’s previous arrests.For the first time, Brendan Mess’s younger brother Dylan and his friends were questioned about Tamerlan Tsarnaev. The FBI agents wanted to know if either Brendan or Tamerlan was involved in organized crime. If Tamerlan had guns. Who else he sparred with. If Tamerlan prayed, if he preached. The agents asked if the auto shops where Tamerlan and his father sometimes worked were part of an organized-crime ring.

A few weeks later, in mid-May, FBI agents called on Dylan again. He and a friend met them at Dwelltime, a café near Inman Square. The agents, who were in plainclothes, took them into the back of a van and showed them a series of photo lineups. Dylan and his friend looked at each other, and told the agents that the man in the last photo looked vaguely familiar.

The man in the photo, they would later learn, was Ibragim Todashev.

No one who knew Ibragim Todashev seemed to have a complete picture of who he was. Even his own father, with whom he spoke regularly, did not know he had a wife in America, let alone a girlfriend. Ibragim was a womanizer. He was kind to children. He had a sweet tooth, and a temper. He was a trained MMA fighter who liked to hang out with a close-knit group of Chechnyan friends; he didn’t socialize outside of that circle. He was an erratic driver—he’ d been in several car accidents. He and his friends liked to drive luxury cars, but they’d buy old, broken-down ones and fix them up. He liked to listen to a Russian singer called Mr. Credo, who sings in a fake North Caucasus accent about buying drugs from the Taliban.

Ibragim was the eldest of 12 children—his father, Abdulbaki Todashev, had two wives. The family was on the move constantly in the chaos of war-torn Chechnya. After the wars, Ibragim attended college in Russia for three years before leaving in 2008. He arrived in Boston with a student visa (though he would never attend school here), and shortly thereafter received asylum.

Ibragim was welcomed into Boston’s insular Chechnyan community. Tamerlan was one of his first friends. They worked out together, and went clubbing. But it seems he never socialized with Tamerlan’s many American friends. He most likely knew Tamerlan’s friend Brendan, though, because the three of them once lived within a few blocks of one another around Inman Square, and they all trained at the Wai Kru gym.

According to owner John Allan, Tamerlan introduced Ibragim to the gym shortly after Ibragim first arrived in Boston in 2008. Allan remembers them praying together before training. “[Ibragim’s] English was horrific, and it was really hard to communicate with him,” Allan recalled. “In the beginning I assumed the fights and problems were related to language. But later I learned he was just very hotheaded.” For some reason, Allan said, the word “motherfucker” would incite in Ibragim an inconsolable rage. “He would lose it. He would just lose it. He would be ready to fight 17 people and not care if he would win or lose. Sometimes it wouldn’t even be directed to him.”

In 2010 Ibragim was working for a medical-transport company when he got into a verbal argument with another driver in traffic on Tremont Street. By the time police arrived, he was out of the car, being held back by several bystanders as he screamed, “You say something about my mother! I will kill you!”

Ibragim met his wife, Reni Manukyan, when she came to visit his roommate in May 2010. He was 24; she was 20. They exchanged phone numbers, and when she went home to suburban Atlanta, they began a courtship via text message. The relationship moved fast. By July, Reni, an Armenian Christian, had converted to Islam and married Ibragim; a few months later Ibragim moved in with her in Georgia. But he had trouble finding work, and came back to Boston in the summer of 2011 to work at another medical-transport company. Reni came to visit that July to watch him fight a match (he lost). She remembered that his friend Tamerlan called frequently during that visit. Reni told reporters that Ibragim left Boston in August; she told me she had a bank statement that proves he was in Atlanta the day after the murders, but she said her lawyers advised her not to show it to me.

By early 2012, Ibragim had moved to Orlando alone. A year later, when the bombs went off in Boston, he was living with a girlfriend in a condo complex located between Universal Studios and a swamp. A month later, the FBI shot him dead.

Anonymous FBI sources gave numerous accounts of Ibragim’s death to the press, managing to be both vague and contradictory. The agency claimed that, just before being shot, Ibragim had been sitting at a table, about to write a statement that would implicate both himself and Tamerlan in the Waltham murders. In some reports, he lunged at an FBI agent with a knife, while others said he used a pole or a broomstick. It was an agonizing development: The FBI claimed he had been killed at precisely the moment he was about to give the answers so many of us had been waiting for.

Whatever occurred in Ibragim’s apartment the night he was shot dead, his death put the FBI on the defensive. The agency quashed the coroner’s report, leading media outlets and the American Civil Liberties Union to call for an independent investigation. On its editorial page, the Globe declared that “the agency’s credibility is on the line” due to its lack of accountability in Ibragim’s death. Ibragim’s father accused the agency of “premeditated murder” and released photos of his son’s bullet-ridden corpse, showing that he’d been shot in the top of the head—even though the FBI contended that one of its agents had fired in self-defense. Instead of providing answers, the FBI’s investigation of Ibragim had turned into a sudden dead end.

Bellie was infuriated. “Oh, I was so angry,” she said. “That was just horrible, because here we had an opportunity, they were starting to make connections and tie people and find out more information… and the man that could’ve given us answers is no longer available to us.”

She added, “Where is there for us to go?”

But there was at least one person who might know more about Ibragim. At the time of his death, he had been living with a woman named Tatiana Gruzdeva. I found her on Facebook: a slight 19-year-old with bleached blond hair and huge green eyes. She posted a lot of selfies. I sent her a friend request. On the night of September 18, she accepted it.

We corresponded for a few minutes, and then she sent me her number. When I dialed, she picked up right away. Her voice sounded small, but she talked rapid-fire, her Russian accent thick but understandable. I told her I was a reporter, and that I wanted to hear her story.

Two days later, I flew to Orlando to meet her.

By the front door of 6022 Peregrine Avenue, a wire statue of a cow held a pink sign with the word “Welcome.” The apartment was all one room, with a lofted bed surrounded by a waist-high wall. Tatiana invited me in, and I looked around, taking in the sliver of a linoleum kitchen, distinguished from the carpeted living room by a small island. Tatiana slept in an upstairs loft, in a bed covered in stuffed animals, watched over by a poster of Muhammad Ali. The back wall was all windows, looking out on a black pond a few yards off, where a bale of turtles broke the surface to take in the evening air. Tatiana pointed out the place in the living room where the carpet had been cut out, because it had been stained with Ibragim’s blood.

She had met Ibragim through a mutual friend, Khusen Taramov. Then she moved in. “First it was just friends,” she said, “and after, we starting having relationship and we were sleeping together like boyfriend and girlfriend.” She cooked him meals. Together they adopted a cat, Masia. “It was like a small family, me and him and the cat, he was like a little baby for us.”

Tatiana knew that Ibragim had been married to Reni. She believed they were divorced.

After the Boston bombings, Tatiana recalled, Ibragim seemed upset. “He didn’t tell me it was his friend, he just was so sad. I said, ‘What happen with you?’ He said, ‘Nothing.’ Long time he don’t want to tell me. And after, he tell me, ‘My friend is dead.’”

The day after Tamerlan was identified as a marathon bombing suspect, Tatiana was washing the dishes when Ibragim stepped outside. Then she heard shouts outside the house: Get down! Get down! She saw Ibragim on the ground, surrounded by six or seven men. She didn’t know who they were, because they weren’t wearing uniforms. She says they told her they were FBI agents.

They handcuffed Ibragim and made him sit in the middle of the room, and began questioning him about the Boston bombings, asking him what he knew and where he was on the day of the attack. Tatiana spoke up: “He was with me, he was in the house, we didn’t do anything wrong,” she told the agents.

“They just kept asking again and again, the same questions,” she said. They asked if he knew Tamerlan Tsarnaev. He replied that the two of them had been friends. Tatiana said this was the first time she had heard the name.

Eventually the FBI left with Ibragim, confiscating his phones and computers. About six hours later, Tatiana said, Ibragim came home, reassuring her that everything was okay. The next day, she said, agents returned their electronics.

As best as I can tell, the FBI arrived on Ibragim’s doorstep looking for a terrorist. The marathon bombings had been the largest act of terrorism on American soil since 9/11, and if there were any chance that the Tsarnaevs had ties to a terrorist organization, federal agents had to find it. Wrapping up a drug murder was not their top priority.

For the next month, Ibragim and Tatiana were under intense surveillance. Agents intercepted Ibragim’s wife, Reni, in an airport and questioned her for five hours; she was later interviewed several more times. They even tracked down his old Boston roommate.

Meanwhile, Tatiana said, agents contacted the couple regularly on the phone, visited their home, and on several occasions called them into the local field office for more questioning. They asked Ibragim about a call from Tamerlan a month before the bombings, just after Ibragim had undergone knee surgery. “He asked how he feels after surgery and Ibragim tells him, ‘I’m better, what about you? How is your family?’ So they would talk just a little bit and that’s it,” Tatiana said. At some point, Ibragim deleted the call from his phone’s memory. “FBI asked him, ‘Why did you delete this phone call?’” Tatiana said. “And he said, ‘I was scared.’”

When Ibragim and Tatiana left the house, he would point out cars to her. “When we go to the workplace or we go hang out with him, he show me in the street, ‘Look, look, they’re following us,’” Tatiana recalled.

On May 4, according to an arrest report, Ibragim got into a fistfight over a parking space, beating a man unconscious. He fled the scene in his white Mercedes, pursued by Orange County Sheriff’s deputies. When they caught him, Officer Anthony Riccaboni got out of the car and drew his gun. Ibragim put his hands up, and Riccaboni got a good look at him.

“I could see the features of the suspect’s ears. I immediately recognized the marks on his ears as a cage fighter/jujitsu fighter,” Riccaboni later wrote in his report. “I told this suspect if he tried to fight with us I would shoot him.”

He made the suspect lie on the ground, but when he got up, he told Riccaboni something unexpected.

“Once on his feet, the suspect commented that the vehicles behind us are FBI agents that have been following him,” Riccaboni wrote. “I noticed 3 (three) vehicles with dark tint. These vehicles began to leave the area. I noticed one vehicle was driven by a male, had a computer stand and appeared to be talking on a radio.”

If Ibragim was right, FBI agents had just watched him beat a man bloody without intervening.

Then they turned the pressure up higher.

About two and a half weeks after Ibragim was first interrogated, the FBI called him back to their office yet again. While he was being interviewed, Tatiana said, two agents took her into an office, where they questioned her for three hours. At first they continued to ask her about the Boston bombings. The agents wanted to know if Ibragim was planning another attack.

“They asked me, ‘Can you tell us when he will do something?’” Tatiana recalled. “I said, ‘No! I can’t!’ Because he wasn’t doing anything, and I didn’t know anything.”

Then they brought up a new topic: a triple murder.

“They said, ‘We think he did something else, before.’ They said he killed three people in Boston 2011 with a knife. I said, ‘It’s not true! I can’t believe it.’ You know, I was living with him seven months, and we have a cat.”

Throughout the course of my reporting, Tatiana is the only one of Ibragim’s associates who recalled being questioned about the Waltham murders before Ibragim’s death.

When agents didn’t get the answers they wanted, Tatiana said, they told her they would call immigration officials to detain her. Her visa had expired weeks before. “I said, ‘Come on guys, you cannot do this! Because all this two and a half weeks, you know my visa was expired and you didn’t do anything. And [now] because you need me and I say I don’t want to help you, you just call to immigration?’ And they said, ‘Yeah, that’s right.’ And they called immigration and immigration came and they took me and they put me in the jail.”

For a week, she said, she was kept in an immigration detention facility. She was allowed to talk to Ibragim every day on the phone. She said he told her that when he had come to find her in the lobby the day she was detained, FBI agents mocked him, saying, “Where’s your girlfriend?”

He told her he was so angry, he felt like hitting them for lying to him and stealing her away.

Later that week, the facility had a visiting day, she said. Ibragim came to see her.

“He kissed me, he hugged me like never, it was so sweet, like always. And he tell me, ‘I will marry you when you get out of here, or in the jail, whatever. If we can marry in the jail, we will marry in the jail.’”

On May 21, the last night of his life, Ibragim was hanging out with friends when the FBI called him again. It was an agent Ibragim’s friends were by now familiar with, but knew only by his first name: Chris. The agent told Ibragim that men from Boston were here to ask him a few questions. Ibragim got nervous. He was afraid of a setup, he told his friend Khusen Taramov.

“And I said, ‘All right, if you don’t want to do it, don’t do it. But if you don’t do it, they’re not gonna leave you alone. They’re gonna get more suspicious.’ And so he decided to go, and he wanted me to go with him,” Khusen told reporters later. Despite his temper and proclivity toward violence, Ibragim had stayed relatively calm under weeks of questioning and scrutiny. But now, heading to meet the “men from Boston,” his demeanor changed. Ibragim gave Khusen his family’s phone number back in Chechnya, and told him about the $4,000 he had in his apartment, inside his jacket pocket. In case he got locked up, Khusen thought. Then Ibragim said something strange: “Worst-case scenario,” he told Khusen cryptically, “forgive me.”

When Khusen and Ibragim got to the apartment, Chris was with three other officers—an FBI agent from Boston, and two Massachusetts state troopers. Orlando police were on the scene as well.

The officers took Ibragim into the apartment and Chris said he needed to interview Khusen outside.

It was 7:30 p.m. At the same time, at two different locations in Georgia, agents were interviewing Reni yet again, and questioning Reni’s mother, Elena Teyer, for the first time.

Agent Chris asked Khusen a few questions, “Like what do you think about bombings, or do you know these guys, blah blah blah, or what is my views on certain stuff. You know what I mean, lotta stuff, different questions,” Khusen said. Chris didn’t mention a triple murder.

Khusen waited outside the house for four hours. Then at 11:30 p.m., he was told to leave, and that the agents would drop off Ibragim back at the plaza where the friends often hung out.

What happened next inside the condo is known only to the officers who were there.

Pictures later released by Ibragim’s family, of his inert body, show that he was shot four times in the chest, twice in the arm, and once in the top of the head.

Neighbors remember hearing shots a little after midnight. One of them looked out the window to see the parking lot filled with police cruisers. Then he heard an ambulance coming.

At Glades County Detention Center, in Moore Haven, corrections officers were suddenly hustling Tatiana from an immigration jail to a cell in solitary confinement.

She didn’t know why they had moved her. When she asked, they said, “We’ll tell you tomorrow in the morning.”

The next morning immigration officers came to her cell. They told her Ibragim was dead.

“They said, ‘He’s gone.’

“I said, ‘Come on, what do you mean? That’s not true.’

“They said, ‘He died yesterday.’

“I said, ‘No! I just talked with him.’

“They said, ‘We have a paper, and it says that he’s dead, and you can make a phone call.’”

She called Khusen. He told her it was true: Ibragim was dead. “And I’m screaming. I have panic attack. I realize, I realize, he is really dead. And it’s true, you know, it’s true. And I will not see him anymore. It’s not like a movie, it’s not like we broke up or something, I will not see him anymore, for all my life. And everything is flush in my heart, my heart was broken, because me and Ibragim, we had a plan, we had a plan to be together, we had a plan to have a family…. And now he’s not here and we’re not going to be together anymore.”

She told me she was given a sedative, and was kept in solitary confinement for four more days before being returned to an immigration jail. Her detainment stretched for months longer. Finally, on August 9, she was released. Ibragim’s friend Ashurmamad Miraliev came to pick her up, along with Ibragim’s father, who had flown to Florida from Chechnya.

They drove her back to the apartment she had shared with Ibragim, where he had been killed. “They said, ‘Don’t worry, the house is clean, and we cleaned everything.’”

But the cat, Masia, was gone. With Ibragim dead, and Tatiana in jail, there was no one to feed it, and it had run away into the swamp.

When FBI agents came to tell Reni Manukyan that her husband was dead, they claimed they had hard evidence of his guilt in the Waltham murders. “We have DNA that proves he was involved in that triple murder,” she remembered them saying. “The only thing I was telling them is, ‘This is not true, this cannot be true.’”

With the exception of Ibragim’s alleged confession, no agency has ever offered an official explanation of how it connected either him or Tamerlan to the Waltham murders. Reni’s account is the only one that even suggests the FBI has physical evidence linking her husband to the crime. Last July, the New York Times quoted an anonymous official suggesting that DNA evidence may have linked Tamerlan to the crime scene. But as for Ibragim, the official said, they made their case based merely on “a lot of circumstantial pieces.”

If, in fact, the FBI had only circumstantial evidence against Ibragim at the time they shot him, it might explain what happened next. Investigators who had previously asked Ibragim’s friends only about the bombings suddenly returned to ask them about the murders. Even though their suspects were both dead, the case remained open. After Ibragim’s death, the FBI continued its take-no-prisoners approach: Several of Ibragim’s friends found themselves detained, interrogated, and ultimately deported.

The first to go was Tatiana. On October 1, after I’d published an account of my interview with her, she called me collect from Glades County Detention Center. She’d been arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers and placed back in solitary confinement—and, she says, immigration agents told her repeatedly that she was about to be deported for talking to Boston magazine. By October 11, she was on a plane back to Russia. An official from ICE confirmed that Tatiana had been in the country legally on what’s called a “deferred action” extension of her expired visa. The official could not tell me why she had been deported.

Others felt the scrutiny of the FBI as well. Several of Ibragim’s Orlando friends worked in a pizza shop; the owner told me that after the FBI came to question him, he fired them. Reni’s mother, Elena—a noncommissioned officer with the U.S. Army—says she was told that she would be flagged as a security risk, preventing a promotion. Khusen left the United States in mid-June, to attend Ibragim’s funeral in Chechnya, but when he attempted to return to the U.S. in December, according to several sources, he was blocked from boarding a plane, despite having a green card.

In one case, I was able to catch a glimpse of how the agency was maneuvering behind the scenes—and how, after Ibragim’s death, its focus seemed to shift from looking for a terror cell to investigating the Waltham murders. When it came to Ibragim’s friend Ashurmamad Miraliev, the agency worked clandestinely with local, state, and federal agencies to manufacture a charge against him, interrogate him without a lawyer present, and ultimately get him out of the country.

After Ibragim’s death, Ashurmamad had come to live with Tatiana, supporting them both with pizza-delivery work. On September 18, while Ashurmamad was driving Tatiana to an appointment with her immigration officer, he was pulled over on an expired driver’s license. But this was no ordinary traffic stop. Between five and seven unmarked law-enforcement vehicles were present; Ashurmamad says FBI agents and local police took him out of his car and escorted him to the Orlando police headquarters. Tatiana never saw him again.

Contacted later, Orlando Police Sergeant Jim Young looked up the arrest record and said it looked like a routine traffic stop—with no mention of FBI involvement. But Ashurmamad says he was questioned by the FBI for hours—he’s not sure exactly how long—and was denied requests to speak to his attorney. (The FBI has declined to comment on this case, but a Tampa Field Bureau public-affairs official told me it is their policy to question individuals “with their consent, or in the presence of their attorney.”)

Agents had previously interviewed Ashurmamad and two of his roommates two days before Ibragim died. They questioned him about his own religious beliefs, the Boston Marathon bombings, and about Ibragim. Now, four months later, the interrogation was different. This time, agents were mostly interested in Ibragim and his involvement in the triple murder in Waltham. They wanted to know if there was someone else who might have been involved in the killings, and who else might have information.

But after hours of questioning, when Ashurmamad asked to leave, the agents told him he was going to jail—on a state charge they claimed to have nothing to do with. That turned out to be an outstanding warrant for a witness-tampering charge. It was the first Ashurmamad had heard of it—but the next thing he knew, he was behind bars.

The trumped-up charge stemmed from an incident the previous summer, when his friend Ibragim had gotten into a fight at a hookah bar with a manager named Youness Dammou. The next day, Youness walked into the pizza shop next door, where Ashurmamad worked. A screaming match ensued; Ashurmamad was angry that Youness had called police after the fight. At the time, police weren’t able to identify Ibragim as the assailant, and Youness never mentioned his confrontation with Ashurmamad, so the case was closed. Then almost a year later, on May 17—five days before Ibragim was shot—the case was suddenly reopened. I wanted to know why.

I found Youness working in an Orlando strip mall. He told me it hadn’t been his idea to reopen the case. Instead, he had been approached by an FBI agent in May, who took him to meet with an Osceola County Sheriff’s Department detective in an unmarked cruiser in a Burger King parking lot. The agent sat in the front seat, Youness sat in the passenger seat, and the detective sat in the back. They showed him a picture of Ibragim. They told him about another fight Ibragim had been in recently—the incident in which agents apparently watched him beat up a man over a parking space without intervening. When he heard about the other assault, Youness was eager to press charges.

The law-enforcement officers did not mention that Ibragim was involved in a larger investigation. A few days later, however, Youness saw Ibragim’s face on the news and learned his aggressor was a murder suspect—and dead.

That was the last he heard about it until the end of August, when the detective came back with another request: The last time they’d met, Youness had recounted the incident with the man who’d screamed at him in the pizza shop, Ashurmamad Miraliev. (Youness hadn’t actually known the man’s name; in the case file the detective wrote that an “Agent Sykes” provided the identification.) The detective said Ashurmamad could be charged with a crime. Would Youness like to pursue charges against him? At first Youness said he wasn’t so sure, but then he agreed.

So the FBI had been matchmaking: They had helped the sheriff’s department go fishing on a long-closed case to find a victim and a charge with which they could pressure or detain first Ibragim, and later Ashurmamad. The witness-tampering charge the FBI brought against Ashurmamad was so flimsy that it was dropped in just a month.

And yet it didn’t matter. Although he had never been to Boston and never met the Tsarnaevs, Ashurmamad was nonetheless flagged—according to a note on the booking sheet—“ON TERRORIST WATCH LIST/PLACED PROTECTIVE CUSTODY AND HIGH RISK. HOUSE ALONE.” Ashurmamad was taken from the Orlando Police Department to the Osceola County jail, where he was kept alone in an 8-by-10 room. To meet with his lawyers, he had to have his hands and wrists shackled and be chained to the ground. Ashurmamad told me there were no windows, the light was always on, and he was always cold. He was there for a month until the tampering case was dropped. But he wasn’t released. His student visa had expired, and he’d missed a court date while he was in jail. So he was moved directly to an immigration detention facility, and on November 4, he was ordered to be deported back to Tajikistan.

Nine months after Ibragim’s death, the FBI still hasn’t put the Waltham case to rest—or offered any further insight into the death of the man who might have closed it. Back in January, FBI director James Comey claimed the agency had completed its report on Ibragim’s shooting and was “eager” to share it—but almost two months later, the report somehow still hadn’t been released. The Florida prosecutor’s office was also investigating the shooting—but at the end of 2013, shortly after speaking with the Department of Justice, it announced the report would be delayed.

When I spoke to Ibragim’s father in February, he said he was waiting to hear the FBI’s findings before deciding whether to file a wrongful-death lawsuit. But that account is unlikely to shed significant new light on Ibragim’s death: The FBI has a long, unbroken history of clearing its agents of wrongdoing in shooting incidents, the New York Times found in a review of 150 such cases over the past two decades. And according to WBUR’s David Boeri—quoting unnamed “law-enforcement sources familiar with accounts of what happened” that night—the FBI has little to add to the story it peddled to reporters on background shortly after the killing. Boeri’s sources told him that during the interrogation, Ibragim admitted to being present at the crime scene but “blamed Tsarnaev for the murders.” He also quoted law-enforcement sources saying that Ibragim had knocked over a table and come at the FBI agent with a pipe.

According to a statement by the Middlesex County DA’s office, the triple-homicide case is “open and active” and state police, Waltham police, and the FBI are conducting a “thorough, far-reaching” investigation. “This investigation has not concluded and is by no means closed,” it said.

They have not updated the statement in nine months.

In late September, Aria Weissman and Dylan Mess invited me to accompany them to the annual Garden of Peace ceremony, which is held beside a dry, stone-lined riverbed near the State House to honor Massachusetts homicide victims. As she does every year, Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley presided over the event. “We have more people who are here to listen and to find some peace tonight,” she said to the crowd that evening.

Afterward, Aria, Dylan, and I approached Coakley and asked her why there hadn’t been any progress in the Waltham case. “We haven’t been getting any answers,” Aria told Coakley.

Coakley was calm and respectful. “I know how frustrating and how difficult it is for you,” she told us. The triple murder, Coakley explained, was not her investigation—it was the Middlesex County DA’s concern. She said that she could and would follow up to make sure state police were working with Waltham police on the murder case. “The Waltham PD and the state police should be working together,” she told us.

But two weeks later, Detective Patrick Hart of the Waltham police, who has been investigating the murders since before the Boston Marathon bombings, told me his department had not been contacted by Coakley’s office. “No one here knows,” he said at the time. “I think I would have been told.”

Two days after I reported on Coakley’s exchange with Aria and Dylan, a victims’ advocate from the Middlesex County DA’s office reached out to Aria. The advocate said officials from the DA’s office were looking to sit down with the victims’ families and provide more information soon. But they never did.

After Ibragim was killed, Bellie Hacker’s friends congratulated her. The case had been solved—she must be so relieved!

“I’d say, ‘Don’t pay any attention, nothing is solved,’” she said.

She’s still waiting to be shown evidence—to know, finally, what truly happened to Erik. “I was told that once they knew something, someone would knock on my door in the middle of the night,” she said. “I was told that I would be contacted even in the middle of the night.”

State officials once told Bellie that they were waiting for a lead to shake loose, maybe from another case.

They were right. But by then it was too late.

By Susan Zalkind | Boston Magazine | March 2014

Find this story at 7 March 2014

Copyright © 2014 Metrocorp, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

The British spy Stakeknife – described by an Army general as “our golden egg” – is now the subject of a £35m criminal inquiry called Operation Kenova.

The inquiry has been triggered by a classified report which Northern Ireland’s Director of Public Prosecutions Barra McGrory QC has told Panorama “made for very disturbing and chilling reading”.

What Stakeknife actually did has been wreathed in speculation since he was identified in 2003 as Belfast bricklayer Freddie Scappaticci.
The one stand-out fact, however, has not been in doubt: for over a decade Scappaticci maintained his cover in the IRA by interrogating fellow British agents to the point where they confessed and were then shot.
One British spy was preparing other British spies for execution.
Step back over Stakeknife, PPS deputy asked
Chief investigator calls for witnesses
New investigation into Stakeknife launched
Stakeknife linked to up to 50 murders
And there were a lot of executions: 30 shot as spies by the IRA’s so-called Nutting Squad which, I am told, Scappaticci eventually came to head.
Panorama has learned that Scappaticci is linked to at least 18 of those “executions”.
‘Draconian injunction’
Not all the victims would have been registered agents like him who produced the best intelligence.
Some were akin to “informers” – people with close access to IRA members, or who passed on what they saw and heard to the security forces.
A few were innocent of the IRA’s charge of spying.
Still, the spectacle of one British agent heading an IRA unit dedicated to rooting out and shooting other British spies is so extraordinary that I’ve often wondered how exactly the state benefitted by the intelligence services having tolerated this for the whole of the 1980s.
The obvious person to ask is Scappaticci himself – but a draconian injunction stops journalists from approaching him, even to the point of making any enquiries about where he now lives or what he does.
The Chief Constable of Bedfordshire Police, Jon Boutcher (left), is leading the investigation with the delegated authority of the PSNI Chief Constable George Hamilton
Image caption

Scappaticci was recruited by a section within military intelligence called the Force Research Unit, or FRU.
I’m told the Army have assessed his intelligence as having saved some 180 lives.
Can Scappaticci’s intelligence have been so valuable that the sacrifice of other agents was a price worth paying to maintain his cover?
It’s not quite that simple.
Had the cavalry been sent in every time Scappaticci tipped off his handlers about who was at risk, he himself wouldn’t have lasted long.
Yet protecting him also meant the murders he knew about – or was even involved in – were never properly investigated, driving a “coach and horses” through the criminal justice system, according to Mr McGrory.
Barra McGrory
Image caption
Barra McGrory said the report made for “disturbing and chilling reading”
Also, the Army’s assessment that Stakeknife saved 180 lives doesn’t translate to the number of actual lives saved as a direct consequence of actioning Stakeknife’s intelligence by, for example, interdicting an IRA unit on active service.
I understand that figure of 180 is partly the army’s guesstimate of lives that would have been lost had Stakeknife’s intelligence not led to arrests and the recovery of weapons.
Of course Stakeknife also contributed significantly to “building a picture” of the IRA, an insight much valued by the intelligence services.
An ex-FRU operative with access to his intelligence told me: “He knew all of the main players and picked up a tremendous amount of peripheral information.
“As the [IRA] campaign changed and the political side became more important again he was highly placed to comment on that.”
‘Cunning and resilience’
No doubt, but it’s hard to quantify “picture building” in terms of actual lives saved.
One thing is for sure: leading a double life at the heart of an IRA unit with a Gestapo-like hold over its rank and file would have required cunning – and resilience.
Especially since Scappaticci told his army handlers he disliked gratuitous violence.
He seems to have managed the violence bit though, even when it was close to home.
I’m told that in January 1988, Scappaticci sent a young boy up to the home of Anthony McKiernan, asking him to call by to see Scappaticci.
The Scappaticcis and McKiernans were friends – children from both families had sleepovers.
That was the last McKiernan’s wife and children saw of him. Accused by Scappaticci’s Nutting Squad of being a spy – something the family strongly deny – some 24 hours later, he was shot in the head.
Bond films
Unsurprisingly, Scappaticci’s ex-IRA comrades paint a less flattering picture than his handlers.
They say he was a prodigious consumer of pornography, loved James Bond movies and – although he was on the IRA’s Belfast Brigade staff – was never a “true republican.”
That might explain why, after Scappaticci was released from detention without trial in December 1975, he drifted away from the republican movement and got involved in a building trade VAT scam.
There were family holidays in Florida.
But then he was arrested by the police and agreed to work for the fraud squad as an informer.
His former IRA comrades also speak of a man with an intimidating manner, handy with his fists and a large ego who liked to be at the centre of things.
His appointment to the IRA’s Nutting Squad – a job most IRA members ran a mile from – certainly gave him that opportunity.
It provided Scappaticci with unrivalled access to what the IRA high command were thinking and their war plans.
Freddie Scappaticci
Image caption
Mr Scappaticci left Northern Ireland when identified by the media as Stakeknife, in 2003
It also gave him access to the names of new IRA recruits on the pretext of vetting them, plus details of IRA operations on the pretext of debriefing IRA members released from police custody to establish whether they gave away too much to their interrogators.
That explains why military intelligence was so eager to recruit Scappaticci when, in September 1979, he graduated to the FRU from spying for the fraud squad.
He got an agent number – 6126 – and a codename. Stakeknife.
His luck ran out in January 1990 after police agent Sandy Lynch was rescued from the clutches of the nutting squad.
The police thought Lynch was about to be shot, Scappaticci having got him to confess. The ordinary CID who did not know Scappaticci was a spy found a thumb print in the house where Lynch had been held.
Scappaticci fled to Dublin. However, a senior police officer who was in the know advised the FRU to get Scappaticci to concoct an alibi for his thumbprint.
It worked. On his return to Belfast in the autumn of 1992, Scappaticci was arrested and then released without charge.
Sidelined
His handlers hoped he could return to spying. But by now the IRA were suspicious and removed him from the security unit.
With Scappaticci’s access to IRA secrets gone, the FRU formally stood him down as an agent in 1995.
How did he escape the same treatment at the hands of the IRA that he had helped mete out to others?
Probably because the sight of his body dumped on a roadside would have provoked a slew of questions about those IRA leaders who appointed him to protect the IRA from spies like him – and who also ignored warnings from their more sceptical comrades along the border that “Scap” was not to be trusted.
That did not stop the IRA in Belfast from putting Scap in his place.
After being sidelined, he agreed to help the staunchly republican Braniff family clear the name of a brother, Anthony, who was shot as a spy in 1981. He was eventually exonerated by the IRA.
But when Scappaticci spoke up for Anthony at a private meeting of republicans, to his embarrassment, the IRA’s most senior man in Belfast, Sean “Spike” Murray suddenly appeared and slapped him down.
When Scap was eventually outed as Stakeknife by a former FRU operative in 2003, he was spirited to England where MI5 told him the IRA knew he had been a spy.
Stakeknife’s gamble
He rejected MI5’s offer of protective custody, flew straight back to Belfast and sought a meeting with the IRA.
He gambled on not being shot because he calculated the IRA now had every reason to support a denial that he was a spy – even though he knew they didn’t believe him.
His gamble was based on the fact that the IRA’s political wing Sinn Fein were now engaged in the peace process.
Scappaticci calculated that were the IRA to admit they’d long suspected he was a spy, it would undermine the official line that they’d fought the British to an honourable draw.
Any such admission would provoke the rank and file into questioning whether the IRA had been pushed into peace, paralysed by the penetration of agents like him.
His gamble paid off.
After meeting two of the most senior representatives of the IRA leadership, Martin “Duckster” Lynch and Padraic Wilson, I’m told Scappaticci and the IRA came to an understanding: Scappaticci would issue a firm denial which the IRA would not contest.
To this day, that’s been the IRA’s official position – even though, as they say in Belfast, the dogs in the street know it’s nonsense.
Once again, Agent 6126 had relied on his wits and native cunning.
Whether the 71-year-old Scappaticci now outwits the 50 detectives trawling over everything he did, what his handlers allowed him to do, and what the IRA leaders authorised him to do, is another question.
You might say he’s the spy who knows too much – because he knows the answers to all these questions.

By John Ware
Reporter, BBC Panorama
11 April 2017
Find this story at 11 April 2017

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