NYC was next attack target, Boston suspect tells officials

New York City Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly (left) and Mayor Michael Bloomberg speak Thursday in New York where police put on a show of force in Times Square, a possible target of the Boston bombing suspects.
New York City Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly (left) and Mayor Michael Bloomberg speak Thursday in New York where police put on a show of force in Times Square, a possible target of the Boston bombing suspects.

NEW YORK - The Boston Marathon bombers were headed for New York’s Times Square to blow up the rest of their explosives, authorities said Thursday, in what they portrayed as a chilling, spur-of the-moment scheme that fell apart when the brothers realized that the vehicle they had hijacked was low on gas.

“New York City was next on their list of targets,” Mayor Michael Bloomberg said.

New York Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said Dzhokhar Tsarnaev told interrogators from his hospital bed that he and his older brother decided on the spot the night of April 18 to drive to New York and set off an attack. In their stolen sport utility vehicle they had five pipe bombs and a pressure-cooker explosive like the ones that blew up at the marathon, Kelly said.

But when the Tsarnaev brothers stopped at a gas station on the outskirts of Boston, the carjacking victim they were holding hostage escaped and called police, Kelly said. Later that night, police intercepted the brothers in a blazing gun battle that left 26-year-old Tamerlan Tsarnaev dead.

“We don’t know if we would have been able to stop the terrorists had they arrived here from Boston,” the mayor said. “We’re just thankful that we didn’t have to find out that answer.”

For a time last week, the brothers were two of the most-wanted men in the world, with surveillance-camera images of their faces released by the FBI and splashed all over the Internet and television.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, is charged in the April 15 Boston Marathon bombings that killed three people and wounded more than 260, and he could get the death penalty. Christina DiIorio-Sterling, a spokesman for U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz in Boston, would not comment on whether authorities plan to add charges on the basis of the purported plot to attack New York.

Investigators and lawmakers briefed by the FBI have said the Tsarnaev brothers - ethnic Chechens from Russia who had lived in the U.S. for about a decade - were motivated by anger over the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

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A series of explosions at the Boston Marathon killed two people and injured several on April 15, 2013.

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On the basis of the younger man’s interrogation and other evidence, authorities have said it appears that the brothers were radicalized via Islamic jihadi material on the Internet instead of through any direct contact with terrorist organizations, but the authorities warned that it is still not certain.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was interrogated in his hospital room Sunday and Monday over a period of 16 hours without being read his Miranda rights advising him to remain silent and have an attorney present. He immediately stopped talking after a magistrate judge and a representative from the U.S. attorney’s office entered the room and gave him his Miranda warning, according to a U.S. law-enforcement official and others briefed on the interrogation.

Kelly and the mayor said they were briefed about the reported New York plot on Wednesday night by the task force investigating the Boston bombings.

Kelly said there was no evidence that New York is still a target. But in a show of force, police cruisers with blinking red lights were lined up in the middle of Times Square on Thursday afternoon, and uniformed officers stood shoulder to shoulder.

In other developments, the search for evidence in the bombings sent white-suited investigators combing in the garbage at a landfill in New Bedford, Mass., on Thursday as they hunted for a laptop computer belonging to one of the Tsarnaev brothers, a law-enforcement official said.

Investigators have been searching for several days for the laptop. They suspect that the computer was thrown out, and they searched the Crapo Hill Landfill in New Bedford, near the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, where Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was a student.

Only one gun has been found from the brothers, officials said.

Several law-enforcement officials said that because Dzhokhar Tsarnaev did not have a gun when he was captured after last week’s shootout, hiding in a boat in a nearby backyard, the gunshot in his neck could not have been self-inflicted, as some law-enforcement officials had said they believed earlier.

Contrary to initial reports that the police had “exchanged” gunfire with him, the law-enforcement official said it appeared that police officers surrounding the boat had fired into it after they saw something push through the boat’s tarp and they feared it was an explosive or a gun.

Meanwhile, the Tsarnaev brothers’ father said he is leaving Russia for the U.S. in the next day or two, but their mother said she was still undecided about whether she’ll make the trip.

Anzor Tsarnaev has expressed a desire to come to the U.S. to find out what happened with his sons, defend the hospitalized son and, if possible, take the older son’s body back to Russia for burial.

Their mother, Zubeidat Tsarnaeva, who was charged with shoplifting in the U.S. last summer, said she has been assured by lawyers that she would not be arrested if she makes the trip to the U.S., but she was still undecided.

In a news conference Thursday in the capital of Dagestan, Russia, the brothers’ parents insisted that their sons were innocent and had no connection to radical Islam. They alleged a conspiracy in which the U.S. authorities murdered their older son, Tamerlan, after seizing him.

Officials in the U.S. have said Tamerlan Tsarnaev was shot during last week’s standoff with police and was run over by a vehicle driven by his younger brother as he escaped from the scene.

Despite this evidence, and after two days of questioning by FBI agents in Dagestan, Zubeidat Tsarnaeva said she would not accept that her sons are guilty.

“No I don’t - and I won’t,” she snapped at the news conference. “Never!”

She said that in the days after the Boston bombing she had seen what she described as video footage on the Internet appearing to show Tamerlan Tsarnaev alive and being put into a police car, naked, apparently stripped to check for explosives. The next day, she said, she saw gruesome images of his dead body.

Anzor Tsarnaev responded sharply to a reporter who asked why Tamerlan Tsarnaev had felt that he did not fit in among Americans, once saying he did not have any friends.

“That’s not true,” Anzor Tsarnaev said, “He have a lot of friends. I know these friends.”

Also Thursday in Russia, President Vladimir Putin said that “to our great regret,” Russian security services lacked any operative information on the Tsarnaev brothers that they could have shared with their American counterparts.

Putin, speaking with reporters after a nearly five-hour call in television show, pointed out that the Tsarnaev brothers lived in the United States and had only visited Russia. That left the Russia’s Federal Security Service little to go on.

During the call-in show, Putin said he hoped that the Boston bombings would enable American and Russian security agencies to work more closely together. He expressed annoyance that Americans tend to describe militants from the Caucasus as “rebels,” rather than as “terrorists.”

Meanwhile, fundraisers and online crowd-funding sites were being set up to help with the medical expenses of the more than 260 wounded in the Boston blasts, and a Boston city fund has already collected more than $23 million in individual and corporate donations.

Leg amputations can cost at least $20,000. Some artificial legs cost $50,000, and an amputee’s rehabilitation can run tens of thousands more.

At least 15 people lost limbs in the bombings, and other wounds include head injuries and tissue torn apart by shrapnel.

Artificial legs need to be replaced every few years, or more often for very active users or those who gain or lose weight. Limb sockets need to be replaced even more often and also cost thousands of dollars each, said Dr. Terrence Sheehan, chief medical officer for Adventist Rehabilitation Hospital in Rockville, Md., and medical director of the Amputee Coalition, a national advocacy group.

Massachusetts is among about 20 states that require health insurers to pay for prosthetic limbs, but many plans don’t cover 100 percent of those costs, Sheehan said.

Some insurers may be willing to make exceptions for the Boston blast survivors.

“We will work to ensure that financial issues/hardship will not pose a barrier to the care that affected members’ need,” said Sharon Torgerson, spokesman for Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Massachusetts, one of the state’s largest health insurers.

Information for this article was contributed by Colleen Long, Jennifer Peltz, Verena Dobnik, Lindsey Tanner, Carla K. Johnson and Tom Hays of The Associated Press; by David M. Herszenhorn, Andrew Roth, Michael Cooper, Serge F. Kovaleski, Wendy Ruderman, Ian Lovett, William K. Rashbaum and Viktor Klimenko of The New York Times; and by Will Englund and Kathy Lally of the Washington Post.

Front Section, Pages 1 on 04/26/2013

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