Posted on April 18, 2014

Note Boston Marathon Bombing Suspect Left Scribbled on the Inside of a Boat

Daily Mail (London), April 17, 2014

The note that Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev wrote on the wall of the boat where he was found after a massive manhunt has been released, showing the motivation behind the fatal attack.

Stains of either red paint or blood are shown dripping down through the angry note and some words were blasted away by bullet holes.

‘The U.S. government is killing our innocent civilians, but most of you already know that . . . I can’t stand to see such [bullet hole] go unpunished,’ the hand-scribbled note obtained by ABC News says.

‘We Muslims are one body. You kill one of us, you hurt [bullet hole] us all.’

Much more was included in the note but very little of it is legible.

The note was written on the side of the wall of the boat in a backyard in Watertown, Massachusetts where Dzhokhar was found.

Earlier reports noted that the phrase ‘F*** America’ was included somewhere but the photo released on Thursday did not show that portion.

Dzhokhar, the now-20-year-old charged with helping his older brother Tamerlan set off two bombs at the finish line of the Boston Marathon last April, is currently awaiting trial and is being held in solitary confinement at a prison in Massachusetts.

ABC reports that his defense team did not have a comment about the note.

Just yesterday, a judge ruled that Dzhokhar can be visited by his relatives without an FBI agent present.

He had previously been watched during the visits, but his defense attorneys argued that there was no clear threat and the agent’s presence prevented the family from speaking freely.

‘This case is very much a story about a family and the relationships between them,’ defense attorney David Bruck said in a court hearing on Wednesday.

The judge agreed with the defense’s point, pushing past the prosecution’s suggestion that the minder was needed for security.

‘I don’t think the safety, security issue looms very large,’ US district judge George A. O’Toole Jr ruled.

The Boston Globe reported that the decision will not be final until the US Bureau of Prisons weighs in, and that is expected to take about two weeks.

The agent’s presence is not only a question of security but could also have a role in the trial as it was earlier reported that during one of these visits, the agent allegedly heard Dzohkhar say something controversial in a heated exchange with his sister.

‘Tsarnaev, despite the presence of an FBI agent and an employee of the federal public defender, was unable to temper his remarks and made a statement to his detriment which was overheard by the agent,’ a late February court hearing stated.

Prosecutors later said that the remark was ‘the driving force’ behind Tsarnaev’s defense team’s decision to push for a change in the visitation procedure.

The strategy also suggests that the defense team is preparing to paint Dzhokhar, who was 19 at the time of last year’s bombings, as under the mental control of his 26-year-old brother Tamerlan who was killed in a shoot out with police.