Tsarnaev friends charged with destroying evidence

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev texted “lol” (“laugh out loud”) in reply to a friend who told him by text message that he looked like one of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects in an image released by the FBI three days after the blasts.

The friend, Dias Kadyrbayev and fellow Kazakh student Azamat Tazhayakov – friends of Tsarnaev’s at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth where they were students – have been charged with knowingly destroying Dzhokhar’s objects impeding the investigation into the bombings.

A third friend of Tsarnaev’s and a student at the university, Robel Phillipos, a US citizen living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has been charged with making materially false statements to law enforcement agents in the investigation into the April 15th bombings that killed three people and injured more than 200.

The three students, who began attending the university at the same time as Tsarnaev in 2011, are alleged to have dumped Tsarnaev’s laptop and backpack containing fireworks in the hours after the images of Dzhokhar and his brother Tamerlan were released to the public on April 18th.

Kadyrbayev and Tazhayakov could spend up to five years in jail and face fines of $250,000 (€185,000) if convicted of obstructing justice. Phillipos faces up to eight years in jail and a $250,000 fine.

Dzhokhar (19) has been charged with killing using weapons of mass destruction following his capture after a manhunt on April 19th, less than 24 hours after Tamerlan (26) was killed following a gun battle with police.

Kadyrbayev told investigators that he met his college friend Dzhokhar two days after the bombings and noticed that Tsarnaev had “appeared to have given himself a short haircut”.

On the evening of April 18th, Phillipos phoned Kadyrbayev to tell him to put on the news because a suspect in the FBI photographs looked like Dzhokhar, according to the criminal charge filed in court.

After seeing the image, Kadyrbayev texted Tsarnaev to say he looked like the suspect. Tsarnaev’s reply contained “lol” and other things that Kadyrbayev interpreted as jokes such as “you better not text me”.

Tazhayakov said one of the texts Kadyrbayev received said: “I’m about to leave – if you need something in my room take it.”

“When he saw this, he believed he would never see Tsarnaev alive again,” the criminal complaint alleges.

Investigators claim that between 6pm and 7pm, shortly after the release of the photographs, the three students went to Tsarnaev’s dormitory room at the university and noticed a backpack containing fireworks that had been opened and emptied of gunpowder.

Kadyrbayev took the backpack and laptop. They also found a jar of Vaseline that Tazhayakov believed Tsarnaev had used “to make bombs”, he told investigators.

One month before the marathon bombings, Tsarnaev had told the two Kazakh students he knew how to make a bomb, Tazhayakov told investigators.

“Kadyrbayev decided to remove the backpack from the room in order to help his friend Tsarnaev avoid trouble,” the FBI alleged in the criminal complaint against the men.

Kadyrbayev threw the backpack and fireworks into a dumpster near the apartment he shared with Tazhayakov about 10pm on April 18th in nearby New Bedford, Massachusetts.