Now he’s in trouble. It is one thing for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to be seen on security camera videos placing one of the bombs that killed three people at last week’s Boston Marathon. But now he’s really crossed a line.
Tsarnaev is telling investigators he and his brother were motivated by religion to plot their carnage, media reports citing anonymous federal sources say.
Radical Islam. It’s a label banned by the Obama administration. National Islamic groups say it doesn’t belong in conversations about terrorism.
Tsarnaev didn’t get the memo.
Recovering from multiple gunshot wounds, Dzhokhar told investigators from his hospital bed that he and his brother Tamerlan Tsarnaev were driven by religious fervor and took their instructions from al-Qaida’s Inspire magazine, NBC News reports. Anger at the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan fueled their rage, the Washington Post reports.
That motivation echoes justifications offered by Army psychiatrist Nidal Hasan for the Fort Hood shooting spree that killed 13 people and Faisal Shahzad’s sentencing rant about his attempt to bomb Times Square in 2010.
“The crusading U.S. and NATO forces who have occupied the Muslim lands under the pretext of democracy and freedom for the last nine years and are saying with their mouths that they are fighting terrorism, I say to them, we don’t accept your democracy nor your freedom, because we already have Sharia law and freedom,” Shahzad told the court. “Furthermore, brace yourselves, because the war with Muslims has just begun. Consider me only a first droplet of the flood that will follow me.”
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