Boston bombs: High-school student who married a suspect

THE wife of one of the Boston marathon bomb suspects is a doctor’s daughter who apparently led the life of an archetypal American high-school student before she converted to Islam.

Katherine Russell Tsarnaev is said to have enjoyed a comfortable middle-class American childhood and was pictured in a school yearbook posing in a slim-fitting tank-top, her long dark hair cascading over bare shoulders.

However, she abandoned this lifestyle after meeting promising young boxer Tamerlan Tsarnaev and swiftly adopted the hijab as she devoted herself to his beliefs.

However, she was kept in the dark over his alleged deadly
intentions and only discovered he was a suspect when she saw
a news report on the terrorist atrocity on television, her
lawyer, Amato DeLuca, said.

The eldest of three daughters, her background was said to have been characterised by conventional American family values.

Known to her friends as Katie, she was raised as a Christian by her father – an emergency physician – and mother, who worked as a nurse.

She was brought up in a detached house in North Kingstown, an attractive and affluent town in Rhode Island, south of Boston, before she reportedly moved on to Suffolk University, in Boston.

It was while studying there that friends introduced her to her future husband, who was then an apparently promising boxer and athlete.

The pair began to date following their first meeting at a nightclub and, at some point after this, she converted to Islam. By then, their relationship was described as being intense.

The pair married in 2009 or 2010, Mr DeLuca said. She left university around this time, apparently without graduating.

When asked why she opted to change her life so dramatically, her lawyer said: “She believes in the tenets of Islam and of the Koran. She believes in God.”

According to reports, Mrs Russell Tsarnaev stood by her husband when he was arrested for violently assaulting her in 2009 at their Massachusetts home.

The widow was pictured collecting belongings from the house she shared with her husband at the weekend, dressed in black and wearing a headscarf and sunglasses.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, and his brother, Dzhokhar, 19, were accused of planting the bombs near the marathon finish line last Monday. The Chechens are alleged to have killed three people and injured more than 180 others.

The brothers’ father has said he will travel from Russia to the United States this week to seek “justice and the truth”.

Anzor Tsarnaev said he has “lots of questions for the police” and he wants “to clear up many things”.

On Sunday, he said only that he planned to go in several days, but the suspects’ mother, Zubeidat Tsarnaeva, said yesterday that the father planed to fly to the US tomorrow.