Mama Tsarnaev Was Also on the Terrorist Watch List; All-American Wife Warned the Bomber that the FBI Was Looking For Him

The family that slays together stays together, or something.

Zubeidat Tsarnaev and her older son were both added by U.S. authorities to the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, or TIDE, database in 2011 — a collection of more than a half million names maintained by the National Counterterrorism Center, an intelligence official said.

She spent yesterday hurling wild conspiracy theories about the bombing and blaming America. Her surviving son spent the day being moved to a more secure hospital.

Her lovely All-American daughter-in-law spent last Thursday warning her now late husband that the FBI was onto him.

According to those officials, Dzokhar Tsarnaev told interrogators that the information that set in motion the series of events leading to Tamerlan’s death and Dzokhar’s apprehension came in a phone call from Katherine Russell Tsarnaeva to her husband. “She notified him and there certainly didn’t seem to be any notion of surprise – just a report that ‘you’re being watched,’” said one official with knowledge of the investigation. Tsarnaev had seen the photographs and videos distributed by the FBI on television and called her husband to give him a heads up.

After receiving that phone call, authorities believe, Tamerlan decided he could not continue to hide from law enforcement and triggered the brothers’ bizarre flight from authorities – a wild chase that included the murder of an MIT police officer, a convenience-store robbery, a carjacking, shootouts with police officers, the death of Tamerlan and the capture of Dzokhar.

She denies knowing anything about the brothers’ terrorist plot, building bombs, any of it, and is supposedly cooperating with the investigation. But they lived together in a very messy apartment. Surely she would have seen him messing around with model toys, pressure cookers and fireworks, and if she didn’t know what he was up to she certainly could have figured it all out. Unless the brothers had some other place to work, that is. It looks like they had found a place outside Boston to test, but they probably didn’t build their bombs in Hell Swamp. They built at least 8 pressure cooker bombs, two of which they set off in Boston, and six they planned to use in New York. They also built smaller bombs that they tossed at police during the chase. They also reportedly had amassed some guns. Building that many bombs takes a work space. They had a lab, somewhere, a garage or rented storage space with lights and power for tools. There’s no evidence of bomb building in their Cambridge apartment, or at least, none that investigators left behind for the press to find and photograph.