Brothers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev spoke of going to New York while driving the streets of Cambridge last Thursday, according to a man who was carjacked and later escaped. The talk came hours before getting int a shootout with police. Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, died, and his younger brother is in fair condition in a Boston hospital.
While previous reports have said the brothers were coming to the Big Apple “to party,” Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., told Fox News they were planning to set off bombs in Times Square, the tourist mecca targeted by Faisal Shahzad in a failed 2010 plot.
“I’ve heard that from police sources that Times Square was mentioned by the bombers and is believed to have been the next attack, the next possible attack,” King said.
In a press conference this afternoon, Mayor Michael Bloomberg confirmed that the bomb brothers planned mayhem at Times Square after successfully bombing the Boston Marathon. New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said the bombers still had six pressure cooker bombs when they engaged in a firefight with police that killed the older brother. They had set off two of those bombs at the finish line at the marathon, killing three and injuring nearly 200.
Did they have additional targets in mind? Was there any connection between the Tsarnaevs and Faisal Shahzad, the man now serving life in prison for trying to bomb Times Square in 2010? Designating the surviving bomber an “enemy combatant” could have helped answer that question, but instead, the Obama administration declined that designation, he was read his Mirand rights, and he is no longer talking.
More: Another mystery that Mirandizing the younger bomber won’t help clear up: How and from whom did they learn to build their bombs? Investigators say that they showed “expertise” in how they built and triggered the devices.
Investigators said the two Boston Marathon bombswere triggered by long-range remote controls for toy cars — a more sophisticated design than originally believed — bolstering a theory that the older suspect received bomb-making guidance on his six-month trip to Russia last year.
Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who died in a shootout with police last week, “more than likely got some instruction in Dagestan,” a federal law enforcement official said Wednesday.
And yet investigators still say no outside group was involved in the bombing. I flat out don’t believe that. If they got instruction, that’s involvement.
Breaking word is that AG Eric Holder directly ordered Tsarnaev to be Mirandized. Congress needs to haul him to the Hill and ask him if and why he did that. He had to know that he was cutting the terror investigation off. He couldn’t not know that.
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