They were taken into custody on Friday night but released a short time later. Now two men believed to have have been roommates with the younger Tsarnaev have been arrested again — this time for possible immigration violations.
Evidently, you can drive a vehicle with license plates showing your support for terrorism, but God help you if you messed up your immigration paperwork:
From the Daily Mail:
The two men who own a BMW with the license plate ‘Terrorista #1’ and who are said to be friends with the younger Boston bombing suspect were taken into custody again on Saturday.
This time the two foreign nationals were arrested over alleged immigration violations in the Massachusetts town, New Bedford, where police say the surviving suspect, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, may have once lived.
The students, named by neighbours by their first names Azmat and Diaz, drive a black BMW 330XI with the personalised plate and a sticker on the back which reads: ‘F*** you, you f****** f****’.
They are thought to be from Kazakhstan and had not been seen since the bombings until Friday night when their ground floor apartment in New Bedford, MA, was raided by a dozen FBI agents at gunpoint.
One of their girlfriends was also arrested on Friday. All three are in their late teens or early 20s.
The three were subsequently released on Friday night before Saturday’s arrest of the two men.
Their apartment was raided because police say the younger Boston Marathon bombing suspect, 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, may have lived at their address.
MailOnline has discovered another link – Dzhokhar Tweeted pictures of the car on his Twitter account J_tsar.
In one picture the BMW is next to another dark coloured sports car with the caption: ‘Place your bets’ as if they are about to race.
[…]
Inside the car was a receipt from a Ralph Lauren store, a pair of Ray Ban sunglasses, a receipt from a shipping company, a prescription, lots of crushed water bottles and a number of parking tickets.
The neighbour told MailOnline that Azmat and Diaz were ‘nice boys’ who were light skinned, thin and short.
She said that they were students at the University of Massachusetts and had been living in the apartment for around a year.
She said: ‘They used to have parties until three or four in the morning. There would be drinking and dancing and the police would come. I didn’t mind but they stayed up til late every now and then’.
Evidently Dzhokhar was something of a party animal. Authorities now believe he hid out in a dorm at University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth, working out at the gym and actually going to a party Wednesday night just hours before he was involved in a huge firefight with police.
The three New Bedford suspects will probably not be charged unless authorities can prove they knew ahead of time about the bombs, or knew where the younger Tsarnaev was hiding. But the Daily Mirror in London is reporting that the FBI is on the trail of a “12-strong terrorist ‘sleeper cell’ linked to brothers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev”:
The FBI was last night hunting a 12-strong terrorist “sleeper cell” linked to the Boston marathon bomb brothers.
Police believe Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev were specially trained to carry out the devastating attack.
More than 1,000 FBI operatives were last night working to track down the cell and arrested a man and two women 60 miles from Boston in the hours before Dzhokhar’s dramatic capture after a bloody shootout on Friday.
A source close to the investigation said: “We have no doubt the brothers were not acting alone. The devices used to detonate the two bombs were highly sophisticated and not the kind of thing people learn from Google.
“They were too advanced. Someone gave the brothers the skills and it is now our job to find out just who they were. Agents think the sleeper cell has up to a dozen members and has been waiting several years for their day to come.”
A specialist team of CIA and FBI interrogators was yesterday flown to a Boston hospital to grill wounded Dzhokhar, 19, about the secret group. The University of Massachusetts student was caught on Friday after hiding out in a boat parked in a garden in locked down Watertown the day after a gun battle with police left his 26-year-old brother and a rookie cop dead.
Dzhokhar is said to have run his brother over as he escaped in a stolen car while Tamerlan lay handcuffed on the ground. They were carrying six bombs with them at the time, three of which exploded, as well as a handgun and rifle. The devices were thought to be pipe bombs.
Last night Dzhokhar – badly wounded but alive – lay handcuffed to his hospital bed under armed guard. The other three arrested in the port of New Bedford are also believed to be of college age.
Caution: I have been unable to find any other media outlet that is independently reporting this story. Any mentions of a sleeper cell associated with the brothers references the Mirror article. This is either a ginormous scoop by the Mirror or a tabloid fantasy.
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