Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has been moved to a prison at Fort Devens, Massachusetts, from the hospital where he had been held since his arrest by police a week ago, the US Marshals Service said today.
The 19-year-old ethnic Chechen, who was badly wounded in an overnight shootout last week with police hours after authorities released pictures of him and his older brother, also a suspect, had previously been held at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, where some of the victims were also being treated.
Tsarnaev’s older brother, 26-year-old Tamerlan, died in the shootout.
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev on Monday was charged with the April 15th bombing, which killed three and wounded 264 at the finish line of the Boston Marathon.
“The US Marshals Service confirms that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has been transported from the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and is now confined at the Bureau of Prisons facility FMC Devens at Ft. Devens, Mass.,” said US marshals service spokesman Drew Wade.
Yesterday New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said the Boston Marathon bombing suspects, brothers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, had planned to bomb Times Square.
Mr Bloomberg said the city authorities were informed on Wednesday night that the surviving suspect, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, told investigators that the busy tourist area in New York was “next on their list of targets”.
The brothers devised the plan on a whim following the bombings as they talked in a car they had hijacked near Boston late last week, said New York city police commissioner Ray Kelly.
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who is recovering in a Boston hospital from wounds sustained in a gun battle with police, told interrogators he and his brother had planned to go to New York to “party” but he changed his story after questioning to say they had planned to detonate the remaining explosives there, according to Mr Kelly.
The brothers are suspected of planting the two bombs that killed three and injured more than 260 near the finishing line of the Boston Marathon.
The Boston Globe reported that the Russian authorities told the US five days ago that it knew of no contact between Tamerlan Tsarnaev and any known terrorist group during his six-month trip last year to the mostly Muslim region of Dagestan. The information would support the theory the brothers acted alone.
Their father, Anzor Tsarnaev, is expected to travel to the US to help investigators. His wife, Zubeidat, refuses to accept that the bombings happened, describing them as fake and telling CNN there was no blood in the bombings and that paint was used instead.
Russian president Vladimir Putin called for closer co-operation with the US on security issues after it emerged that the Russian security services had sought information from the US over concerns that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was preparing to travel to Russia to join "unspecified underground groups".
Additional reporting Reuters