Friends of the slain man say “he wasn’t close friends” with Tamerlan Tsarnaev
Adan Salazar
Infowars.com
July 17, 2013
The FBI has barred a Florida medical examiner from publicly releasing autopsy information that would shed light on the death of 27-year-old Ibragim Todashev, the acquaintance of Boston Marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarvaev, who was shot at least six times by an FBI agent in his Orlando apartment during a routine interrogation on May 20 earlier this year.
“’The FBI has informed this office that the case is still under active investigation and thus not to release the document,’ Tony Miranda, forensic records coordinator for Orange and Osceola counties in Orlando, said in a letter to the media today,” reports the Boston Globe.
According to USA Today, Miranda’s statement cites a Florida statute which bars the release of autopsy reports during criminal investigations. The autopsy was completed July 8 and was reportedly “ready for release.”
CNN reported Todashev was killed “during questioning about a 2011 triple homicide in Waltham, Massachusetts, as well as his relationship with deceased Boston Marathon bombings suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev.”
Two people with direct knowledge of the case told ABC News that Todashev was ready to sign a confession to the 2011 murders, but apparently decided to attack armed officers instead.
Besides claiming that the “violent confrontation was initiated by the individual,” the FBI has yet to release an official explanation regarding Todashev’s murder.
According to an interview with one Todashev’s friends, Todashev may have been wanted for questioning because of a conversation he had had with Tamerlan a month earlier over Skype. The friend also said Todashev had met the older Tsarnaev brother in Boston when he lived there, but “he wasn’t close friends with him, he just happened to know him.”
Prior to the interrogation, Todashev told his friend Khusn Taramiv he felt he would be shot by the FBI. “He felt inside he was going to get shot,” Taramiv said. “I told him, ‘Everything is going to be fine, don’t worry about it.’ He said, ‘I have a really bad feeling.’”
The FBI struggled to get their story straight in the immediate aftermath of the shooting. The narrative of which weapon Todashev used, and the manner in which he supposedly used it, to attack agents changed multiple times, from a knife, to a steel rod, then to a chair, a samurai sword and also a broom stick. Finally law enforcement officials were forced to admit that Todashev was unarmed when he was killed.
Todashev’s father, Abdulbaki Todashev, has maintained his son’s innocence since day one, saying he wasn’t “crazy” and wouldn’t try to attack armed men. After examining autopsy photos of his son’s body sent to him by one of Todashev’s friends, he claims his son was shot “ EX EC ution style” six times in the torso and once in the back of the head.
“They were torturing the man for eight hours. There was no lawyer, no witnesses, nobody. Until we get the results of the official investigation, we can only guess what was going on there,” Abdulbaki Todashev told CNN.
The strange circumstances surrounding Todashev’s death convinced even liberal talking head, MSNBC host and Rhodes Scholar Rachel Maddow that something was awry, although she made a special effort to stay far away from mentioning that evil word “conspiracy.”
Todashev’s suspicious death does nothing to extinguish theories that the Boston Marathon bombings may have been part of a staged drill, and that he was killed as “collateral damage” for possibly knowing too much about the Tsarnaev brothers, including information that could have possibly helped clear their names.
The FBI is stonewalling a congressional investigation into intelligence failures, the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee complained today at a hearing looking into the Boston Marathon bombings and several other domestic terrorism assaults.
“I walked the streets of Boston with my colleague (U.S. Rep.) Bill Keating, and while the city’s resilience and strength were obvious everywhere we went, how this attack could have occurred in spite of multiple warnings was still not clear,” said Chairman Michael McCaul, R-Texas.
The Republican chairman acknowledged the public start of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s trial with his arraignment in Boston’s U.S. District Court today and said his committee would begin hearing classified testimony tomorrow in a closed session with the federal Department of Homeland Security and officials from the National Counterterrorism Center. But he panned FBI officials for refusing to come forward.
“The FBI has refused to appear and continues to refuse this committee’s appropriate requests for information and documents crucial to our investigation into what happened in Boston,” McCaul said. “The problem at the heart of preventing the Boston bombings — the failure to share information — is being witnessed now in this very room. The information requested by this committee belongs to the American people. It does not belong solely to the FBI.”
Speaking at the hearing in Washington today, Boston Police Commissioner Edward F. Davis said while federal, state and local cops worked well together following the bombings, “there is a gap with information sharing at a higher level while there are still opportunities to intervene in the planning of these terrorist events” and he suggested changes in the agreement for joint federal-state task forces.
“Information sharing with local law enforcement task force members need to be improved,” Davis said. “In the aftermath of the marathon bombings, the FBI improved information sharing. This sharing needs to continue and be consistent across all joint terrorism task forces.”
Davis said Boston officials learned from attacks on other cities worldwide and he plans to visit the Middle East this year. “My experience with authorities from London, Northern Ireland, Israel and Jordan was critical to an understanding of what was happening on April 15, 2013.”
Mirroring problems at Ground Zero on 9/11, Davis said law-enforcement officials need a common bandwidth for their exclusive use as the city’s cellphone system was quickly overwhelmed. He hopes for more cameras as well, all problems that will require assistance from the federal government, he said.
The bombings served as a report card on the nation’s counterterrorism efforts 10 years after 9/11, McCaul said, demonstrating that clues can be lost when anti-terrorism agencies fail to share information.
“Terrorists within the U.S. who are inspired by jihadist rhetoric present a new and dynamic threat and must not be looked at as any less deadly that those abroad ,” McCaul said. “In light of Boston, it is more important that ever to find weaknesses in our counterterror efforts that can be fixed before another attack is attempted.”