Boston bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev posted links to Islamic
websites and others calling for Chechen independence on what
appears to be his page on a Russian language social networking
site.
Abusive comments in Russian and English were flooding onto
Tsarnaev's page on VK, a Russian-language social media site, on
Friday after he was identified as a suspect in the bombing of
the Boston marathon.
Police launched a massive manhunt for Tsarnaev, 19, after
killing his older brother Tamerlan Tsarnaev in a shootout
overnight.
On the site, the younger Tsarnaev identifies himself as a
2011 graduate of Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, a public
school in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
It says he went to primary school in Makhachkala, capital of
Dagestan, a province in Russia that borders Chechnya, and lists
his languages as English, Russian and Chechen.
His "World view" is listed as "Islam" and his "Personal
priority" is "career and money".
He has posted links to videos of fighters in the Syrian civil
war and to Islamic web pages with titles like "Salamworld, my
religion is Islam" and "There is no God but Allah, let that ring
out in our hearts".
He also has links to pages calling for independence for
Chechnya, a region of Russia that lost its bid for secession
after two wars in the 1990s.
The page also reveals a sense of humour, around his identity
as a member of a minority from southern Russia's restive
Caucasus, which includes Chechnya, Dagestan, Ingushetia and
other predominately Muslim regions that have seen two decades of
unrest since the fall of the Soviet Union.
A video labelled "tormenting my brother" shows a man
resembling his dead brother Tamerlan laughing and imitating the
accents of different Caucasian ethnic groups.
He has posted his own joke: "A car goes by with a Chechen, a
Dagestani and an Ingush inside. Question: who is driving?"
The answer: the police.
Elsewhere on the Internet, a photo essay entitled "Will box
for passport" shows the older brother Tamerlan Tsarnaev
practicing boxing at a gym. The captions identify him as a
Chechen heavyweight boxer, in the United States for five years.
"I don't have a single American friend," one caption quotes
him as saying. "I don't understand them."
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