Picture emerges of brothers on different paths

One was a boxer who liked Russian rap videos and once said, “I don’t have a single American friend.”

The other, an all-star high school wrestler, listed “Islam” as his worldview on a Russian social-media page and was described by a neighbor as a “very photogenic kid” who had “a heart of gold.”

As a picture has begun to emerge of the two brothers, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, who are suspected of carrying out the bombings at the Boston Marathon, authorities were attempting to determine how they might have evolved into terrorists who would plant powerful bombs in a crowd of innocent people.

The Tsarnaevs came with their family to the United States almost a decade ago from Kyrgyzstan after living briefly in the Dagestan region of Russia, according to family members. Tamerlan, who was killed early Friday morning in a shootout with law enforcement officers, was 15 at the time. Dzhokhar,who was in custody Friday evening, was only 8 at the time.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev graduated from Cambridge Rindge and Latin School in 2011, where he was listed as a Greater Boston League Winter All-Star wrestler. That year, he won a $2,500 scholarship awarded to 35 to 45 promising students by the city of Cambridge.

Anzor Tsarnaev, the brothers’ father, who returned to Russia about a year ago, said in a telephone interview in Russia that his older son was hoping to become a U.S. citizen - Dzhokhar became a naturalized citizen in 2012, but Tamerlan still held a green card - but that a 2009 domestic-violence complaint was standing in his way.

He described Dzhokhar Tsarnaev as smart and accomplished, saying, “My son is a true angel.” He said his son was “an intelligent boy” who was studying medicine.

“They were set up, they were set up!” he exclaimed. “I saw it on television; they killed my older son Tamerlan.”

Ruslan Tsarni, the brothers’ uncle, said at a news conference at his home outside Washington on Friday that his nephews had difficulty adjusting to the United States and that he thought their actions came from “not being able to settle themselves and hating everyone who did.”

But he said he had not seen his nephews since December 2005, and he implied that some rift had occurred between the two families.

“My family has nothing to do with that family,” he said. “I just want my family to be away from them.”

Tsarni said the two brothers may have been radicalized, but, if so, it was not their father who was responsible.

“I never ever imagine that children of my brother would be associated with that,” he said.

Tsarni, 42, also spoke of the influence Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s older brother had over him, saying of Tamerlan in a telephone interview, “He could manipulate him.”

Judith Russell, whose oldest daughter, Katherine, was married to Tamerlan Tsarnaev, spoke Friday evening, saying her family was sickened by the horror inflicted by the deadly attack.

“Our daughter has lost her husband today, the father of her child. We cannot begin to comprehend how this horrible tragedy occurred,” Russell said. “In the aftermath of the Patriots’ Day horror, we know that we never really knew Tamerlan Tsarnaev.”

She pleaded for privacy for her family after Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s death. When asked how she was doing, she said, “Basically, he’s dead and we have to deal with it.”

FRIEND CALLED FBI

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was a student at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, the school confirmed Friday. The campus was closed Friday.

Robert Lamontagne, a university spokesman, declined to comment beyond confirming that Tsarnaev was registered there. He would not immediately say when Tsarnaev enrolled, what he was studying or whether he lived on campus.

Students said Dzhokhar Tsarnaev lived on the third floor of the Pine Dale dormitory. Multiple students said they saw him in a dorm hallway this week after the bombings.

“He was regular, he was calm,” said Harry Danso, who lives on the same floor. He described Tsarnaev as a quiet kid who would sometimes ask him for a homework assignment.

Mahmoud Abu-Rubieh, 17, a student at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, said he had known Dzhokhar Tsarnaev for almost three years as a friend and a wrestling teammate. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, he said, dressed “like any other student at our school,” favoring jeans or khakis, button-ups and T-shirts.

“I never heard him talkabout politics,” Abu-Rubieh said. “He didn’t really bring up anything like that.”

Ashraful Rahman, 17, a senior at the high school, said he and two other friends recognized Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s photo on television Thursday night and one of them called the FBI’s tip line.

But he said he could not believe that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, whom he met two years ago, could have been involved in the bombing.

He and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev have much in common, he said: Both are wrestlers, both enjoy boxing and both are Muslim. They would occasionally meet at the mosque in Cambridge, a few blocks away from their school, he said.

Rahman described Dzhokhar Tsarnaev as “laid back” and said he had assumed he was born in the United States because he did not speak with an accent.

Rahman said he last saw Dzhokhar Tsarnaev last August, near the end of Ramadan, during prayers at the mosque.

“Regardless of whether you knew him as well as I did, as someone who wrestled with him, hung out and chilled with him or whether you were people who saw him in the hallway, he was always the same - a generally nice guy,” Rahman said, adding that he was a hardworking student and an even harder working wrestler.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who died after a shootout with law enforcement officers early Friday, apparently was studying engineering at Bunker Hill Community College when a photographer, Johannes Hirn, chose a young boxer as the subject of an essay for a photojournalism class at Boston University four or five years ago.

In the essay, the subject, believed to be Tamerlan Tsarnaev, is quoted as saying he had become devoutly religious, having abandoned smoking and drinking. He sounded alienated from Russia, saying that he would not want to box on the Russian team unless Chechnya achieved independence. The essay was later published in a university magazine, The Comment, according to Peter Southwick, director of the photojournalism program, who taught the class.

“There are no values anymore,” Hirn quotes him as saying. “People can’t control themselves.”

Both young men had a substantial presence on social media. On Vkontakte, Russia’s most popular social-media platform, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev describes his worldview as “Islam” and, asked to identify “the main thing in life,” answers “career and money.” He lists a series of affinity groups relating to Chechnya, where two wars of independence against Russia were fought after the Soviet Union collapsed, and lists a verse from the Koran, “Do good, because Allah loves those who do good.”

FAMILY ON THE MOVE

The family is part of a Chechen diaspora that dates back to 1943, when Josef Stalin deported most of the population of Chechnya from its homeland over concerns the Chechens were collaborating with the Nazi German invading army. Most returned to Chechnya in the 1950s, after the death of Stalin and lifting of the deportation order, but some stayed. Kyrgyzstan’s Chechen diaspora is concentrated in a steppe region on the Kazakh border, near the town of Talas.

Among the former diaspora in Kyrgyzstan was the first rebel president of Chechnya in the post-Soviet period, Dzhokhar Dudayev, who hailed from the Kyrgyz diaspora villages, said Edil Baisalov, a former presidential chief of staff in Kyrgyzstan.

Irina Bandurina, secretary to the director of School No. 1 in Makhachkala, Russia, said the Tsarnaev family left Dagestan for the United States in 2002 after living there for about a year. She said the family - parents, two boys and two girls - had lived in Kyrgyzstan previously.

She said Dzhokhar Tsarnaev attended School No. 1 in the first grade, and Tamerlan Tsarnaev attended school in Makhachkala through the eighth grade. She said she did not know them personally.

Adnan Dzarbrailov, the head of a Chechen diaspora group in Kyrgyzstan, said in a telephone interview that the Tsarnaev family lived near a sugar factory in the small town of Tokmok, about 40 miles from the Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan. The last member of the family left years ago, he said. He described them as “intelligentsia” and said an aunt of the bombing suspects was a lawyer.

Sultan Tsarnaev, a grandfather of the brothers, died in an accident in Tokmok in 1980, when a propane tank he was carrying exploded, said Dzarbrailov and Uzbek Aliyev, a Chechen living in Tokmok. Their uncle, Anwar Tsarnaev, studied at a university in Bishkek with Aliyev.

“They were good students, they were good people,” he said of the uncle and aunt of the bombing suspects. Both brothers eventually emigrated from Kyrgyzstan, he said.

Government officials said Friday that investigators believe Tamerlan Tsarnaev traveled to Russia last year and returned to the U.S. six months later.

The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk publicly about the investigation. Tsarnaev traveled from John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York, one of the officials said.

In the past several months, Tamerlan Tsarnaev had posted videos to You-Tube indicating his interest in Muslim ideologies.

On a YouTube channel, Tamerlan created a video file called “Terrorists,” where he posted footage that has since been removed from view. He also shared other videos of lectures from a radical Islamic cleric. In one video, Arab voices can be heard singing as bombs explode from highrise buildings.

The caption below says: “Then Allah will rise an army from the non-Arabs, who will be greater riders and will have better weapons than the Arabs … but their weapon will be the weapon of faith.” Information for this article was contributed by Erica Goode, Ellen Barry, Serge F. Kovaleski, Katharine Q. Seelye, John Eligon,Adam B. Ellick, Richard A. Oppel Jr., Dina Kraft, Julia Preston and Emily S. Rueb of The New York Times; by Jerry Markon, Sari Horwitz, Carol D. Leonnig, Will Englund, Julie Tate, Clarence Williams, Dan Morse and David Montgomery of The Washington Post; by Eileen Sullivan, Kimberly Dozier, Arsen Mollayev, Erika Niedowski, Michelle R. Smith, Bob Salsberg and Pat Eaton-Robb of The Associated Press; and by Phil Mattingly,Annie Linskey, Mike Dorning and staff members of Bloomberg News.