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| FILE - In this Feb. 17, 2010, photo, Tamerlan Tsarnaev smiles after accepting the trophy for winning the 2010 New England Golden Gloves Championship in Lowell, Mass. Tsarnaev, the Boston Marathon bombing suspect killed in a police shootout, was buried in an undisclosed location outside the city of Worcester, police said Thursday, May 9, 2013. |
WORCESTER, Mass.
(AP) -- The body of Boston Marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan
Tsarnaev was entombed in an unknown gravesite Thursday after police said
an anonymous person stepped forward to help arrange the secret burial.
The
burial ended a weeklong search for a place willing to take Tsarnaev's
body out of Worcester, where his remains had been stored at a funeral
home amid protests. In that time, the cities where Tsarnaev lived and
died and his mother's country all refused the remains.
Amid
the frustration, Worcester's police chief urged an end to the quandary.
"We are not barbarians," he said. "We bury the dead."
By
Thursday, police announced: "As a result of our public appeal for help,
a courageous and compassionate individual came forward to provide the
assistance needed to properly bury the deceased."
Police in Worcester, about 50 miles west of Boston, didn't say where the body was taken, only that it was no longer in the city.
The
director of Graham Putnam & Mahoney Funeral Parlors, Peter Stefan,
also refused to say where the body was buried or to speak to media
gathered outside the funeral home.
Tsarnaev's burial place is expected to become known with the release of his death certificate.
Tamerlan
and his brother, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, are accused of setting off two
shrapnel-packed pressure-cooker bombs April 15 near the marathon finish
line in an attack that killed three people and injured more than 260.
Days
later, the brothers engaged in a firefight in which Tamerlan Tsarnaev,
26, was shot by police and then run over by his fleeing brother. A
wounded Dzhokar Tsarnaev, 19, ditched the car and was later found hiding
in a boat parked in a Watertown backyard.
Tamerlan
Tsarnaev was pronounced dead at a hospital in Boston, where he could
have been buried under state law, because the city was his place of
death. But Boston officials said they wouldn't take the body because
Tsarnaev lived in Cambridge, and Cambridge also refused.
The
mother of the brothers, ethnic Chechens from southern Russia who lived
in Massachusetts, said officials in Russia, where she lives, also
wouldn't accept the body.
In addition, Stefan
said scores of individual offers fell through because cemeteries in
their communities wouldn't take the corpse.
On
Thursday, Gov. Deval Patrick called the weeklong drama to find a burial
site a circus, but said he doesn't know where the site is. Patrick said
he hopes attention can now return to caring for the victims of the
bombing.
The family of the youngest of the
three killed, 8-year-old Martin Richard, said Richard's 7-year-old
sister has undergone a "milestone" 11th operation on her left leg, which
she lost below the knee.
The surgery
performed Wednesday on Jane Richard at Boston Children's Hospital closed
the wound and will allow for the eventual fitting of a prosthesis, the
family said in a statement Thursday.
The
family said that because of the surgeries, infections and other
complication, the girl was unable to communicate with her parents and
doctors for two weeks, so she did not know at first that her brother was
dead.
"There are not words to describe how
hard sharing this heartbreaking news was on all of us," said the family,
which was within feet of the second blast.
In
Washington, Boston Police Commissioner Edward Davis told Congress on
Thursday that the FBI did not initially share with Boston police the
warnings from Russia's security service in 2011 about Tamerlan Tsarnaev.
At the time, four city police representatives were on a federal
terrorism task force.
Davis' testimony at the
hearing on the government's response to the attack revealed a gap in
information-sharing between federal and local officials.
The
FBI closed its assessment of Tsarnaev after a cursory investigation,
and Davis said that police might not have uncovered or disrupted the
plot even if they had fully investigated Tsarnaev's family.
"I
can't say that I would have come to a different conclusion based upon
the information that was known at that particular time," he said.
