Boston bomber suspect died of gunshot wounds

Director of funeral home housing body of Tamerlan Tsarnaev says he died of “gunshot wounds of torso and extremities”.

Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, left, who survived now faces a charge of using a weapon of mass destruction to kill [Al Jazeera]

A suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings died from gunshot wounds and blunt trauma to his head and torso, a funeral director said.

Peter Stefan has 26-year-old Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s body and read details from his death certificate on Friday.

The certificate cites Tsarnaev’s “gunshot wounds of torso and extremities” and lists the time of his death as 1:35am on April 19, four days after the deadly bombing, Stefan said.

Stefan also said he was struggling to find a graveyard willing to accept the body of Tsarnaev, and would turn to government officials for help if he failed to find a resting place for him soon.

“Everyone deserves a burial. It doesn’t matter who it is,” Stefan said, adding dozens of protesters gathered outside his funeral home, upset with his decision to handle the funeral.

“I keep bringing up the point of Lee Harvey Oswald, Timothy McVeigh or Ted Bundy. Somebody had to do those, too.”

The trio are blamed for the assassination of John Kennedy, the 35th US president, the 1995 Oklahoma bombing and serial killing and rape respectively.

Tsarnaev died after a gunfight with authorities who had launched a massive manhunt for him and his brother, ethnic Chechens from Russia who came to the United States about a decade ago.

Police have said he ran out of ammunition before his younger brother dragged his body under a vehicle while fleeing.

Tsarnaev’s family on Friday was making arrangements for his funeral as investigators searched the woods near a college attended by 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who was captured less than a day after his brother’s death.

The funeral parlour is familiar with Muslim services and said it would handle arrangements for Tamerlan Tsarnaev, whose body was released by the state medical examiner on Thursday.

The body initially was taken to another funeral home, where it was greeted by about 20 protesters.

Increased border checks

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who was found hiding in a tarpaulin-covered boat in a suburban Boston backyard, faces a charge of using a weapon of mass destruction to kill.

Three of his college classmates were arrested on Wednesday and accused of helping after the bombing to remove a laptop and backpack from his dormitory room before the FBI searched it.

The April 15 bombing, using pressure cookers packed with explosives, nails, ball bearings and metal shards, killed three people and injured more than 260 others near the marathon’s finish line.

The brothers’ mother insists the allegations against them are lies.

Meanwhile, the Department of Homeland Security ordered border agents to immediately begin verifying that every international student who arrives in the US has a valid student visa, according to an internal memorandum obtained on Friday by the Associated Press.

The new procedure is the government’s first security change directly related to the Boston bombings.

The order from a senior official at US Customs and Border Protection, David J Murphy, was circulated on Thursday and came one day after President Barack Obama’s administration acknowledged that one of the students accused of hiding evidence, Azamat Tazhayakov, of Kazakhstan, was allowed to return to the US in January without a valid student visa.

Source: News Agencies