Boston: FBI admits missed warning signs over Tamerlan

Federal investigators knew two years ago that Russian intelligence suspected Tsarnaev of terrorist activities.

Both Democrats and Republicans have demanded to know why the FBI closed its investigation into him after interviewing him in 2011, and how crucial pointers to his jihadist leanings were missed.

The Senate intelligence committee has also ordered a review and will hold hearings into the issue, which could begin as soon as today.

Michael McCaul, the chairman of the House of Representatives homeland security committee, has written to the Obama administration seeking a full account of the apparent intelligence failure and pointing out that Tsarnaev “appears to be the fifth person since September 11, 2001, to participate in terror attacks despite being under investigation by the FBI”.

The incidents “raise the most serious questions about the efficacy of federal counter-terrorism efforts”, Mr McCaul said in the letter to the US homeland security secretary, Janet Napolitano, the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, and the director of the FBI, Robert Mueller.

The FBI was tipped off to Tsarnaev two years ago by the Russian government. He was interviewed and no further action taken, although the Russian warning was enough to put a block on his hopes of becoming a US citizen.

While his younger brother, Dzhokhar, was granted US citizenship in September last year, Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s application stalled.

He went on to spend six months purportedly visiting his father in Makhachkala, Dagestan – a hotbed of Islamic militancy – last year. The trip went unnoticed by the FBI because, as the agency’s chief has told US senator Lindsey Graham, the Russian airline, Aeroflot, mis-spelled his name on a passenger manifest.

Yet all travellers in and out of the US are also tracked by their passport numbers and immigration permits – which, in Tamerlan’s case, was a green card.

When he returned to the US, family and friends noted that he had become heavily radicalised.

He even created his own playlist on YouTube of videos devoted to Islamic terrorism, among them a video about the death of an Islamic insurgent known as Abu Dijana, who had been in Makhachkala at the same time as him last year and was killed in a firefight with Russian security forces in December.

He also posted links to Imarat Kavkaz, a movement founded in Chechnya that brings together jihadist groups fighting for a separatist Islamic state in the Russian caucasus, a US intelligence source has said.

The group’s leader, Chechen guerrilla Doku Umarov – who claimed to have masterminded the 2011 bombing of Moscow airport, which killed 35 people –- was said by the US State Department in 2010 to be a threat to both Russia and the United States.

“I think it’s very probable that when he [Tsarnaev] was in the region, and it’s a very dangerous region… he could have got trained at that point,” said Mr McCaul, a Republican congressman from Texas.

Senator Chuck Schumer, a Democrat, added: “This man was pointed out by a foreign government to be dangerous. He was interviewed by the FBI once.

“What did they find out and what did they miss?”

The FBI, which initially denied having ever known Tsarnaev when asked last week, has admitted that he was on their radar in 2011.

Mr Mueller has told Senator Graham that, after finding nothing of concern about Tsarnaev in 2011, the FBI reported back to the Russian intelligence services asking whether they had any further information to pass on, but that they never received a response.