The uncle of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects told TODAY Saturday that he believes Dzhokar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev were pawns in a deadly scheme.
"I strongly believe they were just puppets and executors of something of bigger scale," Ruslan Tsarni told Savannah Guthrie.
He said Dzhokar, the younger of the brothers, was "used by his older brother. He’s just another victim of his older brother. He victimized others, but he’s been used by his older brother."
Tsarni, a Maryland resident who is the brother of the suspects’ father, believes Tamerlan, 26, who died in a confrontation with police early Friday morning, was radicalized by others. He noted that the suspects were in his house as children, and recalled a surprising transformation the last time he saw Tamerlan in 2009.
“There certainly were mentors,’’ Tsarni said. “I was shocked when I heard his words, his phrases, when every other word he starts sticking in words of God. I question what he’s doing for work, (and) he claimed he would just put everything in the will of God. It was a big concern to me. He called me 'confused' when I started explaining to him, make yourself useful to yourself and to your family and maybe you’ll have extra to share with everybody else."
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Think I'm off the wall here? Go read Bracken's essays.
