WATERTOWN, Mass. - Boston police said a 19-yearold college student wanted in the Boston Marathon bombings was in custody after a manhunt that left the city virtually paralyzed and his older brother and purported accomplice dead.
Police announced via Twitter that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was in custody Friday night. They later wrote, “CAPTURED!!! The hunt is over. The search is done. The terror is over. And justice has won. Suspect in custody.”
Tsarnaev was hospitalized in serious condition with unspecified injuries, police said.
A Justice Department official said Tsarnaev will not be read his Miranda rights because the government is invoking a public-safety exception.
That official and a second person briefed on the investigation said he will be questioned by a special interrogation team for high-value suspects. The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to disclose the information publicly.
The public-safety exception permits law enforcement officials to engage in a limited and focused unwarned interrogation of a suspect and allows the government to introduce the statement as evidence in court. The exception is triggered when police officers have an objectively reasonable need to protect the police or the public from immediate danger.
Meanwhile, police also said Friday evening that three people were taken into custody for questioning at a housing complex where Tsarnaev may have lived.
New Bedford police Lt. Robert Richard said a private complex of off-campus housing at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth was searched by federal authorities Friday evening, and the FBI took two men and one woman into custody for questioning.
Tsarnaev may have resided at or was affiliated with the housing complex, he said.
Police had announced earlier Friday evening that they were scaling back the hunt for Tsarnaev because they had come up empty-handed after an all-day search that sent thousands of special weapons and tactics team officers into the streets and paralyzed the metropolitan area.
But then a break came in a Watertown neighborhood when a homeowner saw blood on his boat, pulled back the tarp and saw the bloody suspect hiding inside, police said. Police in armored vehicles and tactical gear rushed into the neighborhood.
After Tsarnaev’s capture, Boston Mayor Tom Menino Tweeted “We got him,” along with a photo of the police commissioner speaking to him.
President Barack Obama declared Friday night that Tsarnaev’s capture “closed an important chapter in this tragedy.” But he acknowledged that many unanswered questions remain about the motivations of the two men accused of perpetrating the attacks that unnerved the nation.
“The families of those killed so senselessly deserve answers,” said Obama, who branded the two suspects “terrorists.”
In Boston, celebratory bells rang from a church tower. Crowds lined the streets into the center of town. Teenagers waved American flags. Every car that drove by honked. Every time an emergency vehicle went by, people cheered loudly.
Hundreds of people marched down Commonwealth Avenue, chanting “USA” and singing the Red Sox anthem “Sweet Caroline” as they headed toward Boston Common. Police blocked traffic along part of the street to allow for the impromptu parade.
Earlier Friday, state police Col. Timothy Alben said at a news conference that he believed that Tsarnaev was still in Massachusetts because of his ties to the area. But authorities had lifted a stay-indoors warning for people in the Boston area, and the transit system started running again by evening.
“We can’t continue to lockdown an entire city or an entire state,” Alben said. At the same time, he and other authorities warned that Tsarnaev is a killer and that people should be vigilant.
Tsarnaev fled on foot after a furious overnight gun battle that left 200 spent rounds behind and after a wild car chase in which he and his brother hurled explosives at police, authorities said. His brother, 26-year-old Tamerlan Tsarnaev, died in the shootout, run over by his younger brother in a car as he lay wounded, investigators said.
During the overnight violence, the brothers also shot and killed a Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus policeman in his cruiser and severely wounded another officer, authorities said.
Law enforcement officials and family members identified the brothers as ethnic Chechens who immigrated to the U.S. They lived near Boston and had been in the U.S. for about a decade, said the suspects’ uncle, Ruslan Tsarni of Montgomery Village, Md. Officials said Dzhokhar Tsarnaev became a naturalized U.S. citizen on Sept. 11, 2012.
“We believe this man to be a terrorist,” Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis said. “We believe this to be a man who’s come here to kill people.”
The bloody turn in the case happened just hours after the FBI released photos and video of two suspects in the bombing and asked for the public’s help in identifying and catching them.
Authorities said the man dubbed Suspect No. 1 - the one in sunglasses and a dark baseball cap in the surveillance-camera pictures - was Tamerlan Tsarnaev, whileSuspect No. 2, the one in a white baseball cap worn backward, was his brother.
The bombings Monday near the Boston Marathon finish line killed three people and wounded more than 180, tearing off limbs in a spray of shrapnel and sparking fears across the nation. The blasts ripped through spectators, killing an 8-year-old boy, a 29-year-old woman and a Chinese graduate student at Boston University.
Chechnya has been the scene of two wars between Russian forces and separatists since 1994, in which tens of thousands were killed in heavy Russian bombing. That spawned an Islamic insurgency that has carried out deadly bombings in Russia and the region, although not in the West.
But investigators had shed no light on the motive for the marathon attack and said it was unclear whether any terrorist organizations had a hand in it.
The FBI was swamped with tips after the release of the photos - 300,000 every minute by one estimate - but what role those played in the overnight clash was unclear.
State police spokesman Dave Procopio said police realized they were dealing with the bombing suspects based on what the two men told a carjacking victim during their getaway attempt.
Exactly how the long night of crime began was marked by conflicting reports. But police said the brothers carjacked a man in a Mercedes-Benz in Cambridge, just across the Charles River from Boston, then released him unharmed at a gas station.
They also were accused of shooting to death an MIT police officer, 26-year-old Sean Collier, while he was responding to a report of a disturbance, investigators said.
The search for the Mercedes led to a chase that ended in Watertown, where authorities said the suspects threw explosive devices from the car and exchanged gunfire with police. A transit police officer, 33-year-old Richard Donohue, was shot and critically wounded, authorities said.
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev somehow slipped away. He ran over his already wounded brother as he fled by car, according to two law enforcement officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the investigation.
Tamerlan Tsarnaev died at a Boston hospital after suffering what doctors said were multiple gunshot wounds and a possible blast injury.
The brothers had built an arsenal of pipe bombs, grenades and improvised explosive devices and used some of the weapons in trying to make their getaway, said Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger, D-Md., a member of the House Intelligence Committee.
Another uncle, Alvi Tsarnaev, who also lives in Montgomery Village, told news organizations that Tamerlan Tsarnaev had called him Thursday night - hours before his firefight with police - and the two spoke for the first time in two or three years. He said the young man asked for forgiveness for the rift in the family.
“He said, ‘I love you and forgive me,’” the uncle said.
The FBI on Friday removed a computer from the New Jersey home of a sister of the suspects. Police said she was cooperating with the investigation and was “heartbroken, surprised and upset,” though she told reporters she wasn’t sure the accusations against her brothers were true.
The woman, identified by local police as Ailina Tsarnaeva, told federal agents she had not been in contact with her brothers for years, according to Police Director Michael Indri.
“The main concern was to confirm that there was no contact made one way or the other, and I’m confident that the FBI has confirmed that,” he said.
Early in the day, she spoke through a barely open door to News12 New Jersey and The Star-Ledger, telling them she was sorry for the families that lost loved ones “the same way I lost my loved one.”
“I’m hurt for everyonethat’s been hurt,” she told the TV station and newspaper.
U.S. government officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not allowed to talk about an investigation in progress, said Tamerlan Tsarnaev traveled to Russia last year and returned to the U.S. six months later.
A federal law enforcement official also said Friday the FBI interviewed the older suspect at the request of a foreign government in 2011 and that nothing derogatory was found. The official said the FBI shared its information with the foreign government. The official did not say what country made the request about Tamerlan Tsarnaev or why.
Now officials are scrutinizing his Russia trip to see whether he might have met with extremists.
According to the FBI, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was seen setting down a bag at the site of the second of two explosions at the marathon finish line.
Insurgents from Chechnya and neighboring restive provinces in the Caucasus have long been involved in terrorist attacks in Moscow and other places in Russia.
In 2002, Chechen militants took 800 people hostage in Moscow and held them for two days before special forces stormed the building, killing all 41 captors. Also killed were 129 hostages, mostly from the effects of the gas Russian forces used to subdue the attackers.
Chechen insurgents also launched a 2004 raid in the southern Russian town of Beslan and took hundreds of hostages. The siege ended two days later with more than 330 people, about half of them children, killed.
Information for this article was contributed by Eileen Sullivan, Katie Zezima, Meghan Barr, Stephen Braun, Jay Lindsay, Pat Eaton-Robb, Jeff Donn, David Porter, Samantha Henry, Stephen Braun, Jack Gillum, Steve Peoples,Allen G. Breed, Bridget Murphy, Julie Pace, Pete Yost, Kimberly Dozier and Mike Hill of The Associated Press; by Phil Mattingly, Annie Linskey, Brian K. Sullivan, Christopher Condon, Rachel Layne, Julie Bykowicz and Joe Sobczyk of Bloomberg News; and by Katharine Q. Seelye, William K. Rashbaum, Michael Cooper, Richard A. Oppel Jr., John Eligon, Jess Bidgood, Serge F. Kovaleski,Timothy Rohan, Ravi Somaiya, Eric Schmitt, Michael S. Schmidt, Andrew Siddons, Sebnem Arsu, Ellen Barry,Andrew Roth and Andrew E. Kramer of The New York Times.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 04/20/2013