After the horror of last Monday's marathon bombings and the dramatic manhunt that shut down much of Boston on Friday and ended with the death of one of the alleged bombers and the capture of the other, many questions remain unanswered. The more that is known about 26-year-old Tamerlan Tsarnaev and his 19-year-old brother, Dzhokhar, the less clear have their motives and intentions become. Born in the disputed Russian region of Chechnya, the brothers had lived in the United States for more than a decade and Dzhokhar, who is seriously ill in hospital, is a US citizen. Although the brothers appear to have been drawn into radical Islamism in recent months and Tamerlan, who died in a police shoot-out on Friday, had been questioned by the FBI, there is no evidence so far that their alleged actions were part of a broader terrorist conspiracy.
This has not stopped some Republican politicians from suggesting that the surviving brother should be treated as an "enemy combatant" engaged in an act of war and subjected to a military trial. President Barack Obama, who has acted with commendable restraint throughout the past week while showing profound empathy for the victims of the bombings, should resist such calls. As a US citizen accused of a crime on US soil, Tsarnaev should be prosecuted through the civilian criminal justice system. The authorities have already alarmed civil liberties watchdogs by invoking a controversial "public safety" exception to delay reading the bombing suspect his rights, including the right to remain silent and to have a lawyer present during questioning.
The FBI have questions to answer about why, after questioning Tamerlan Tsarnaev in 2011 following a Russian tip-off, they concluded that he did not represent a threat. But the authorities must also explain why it was necessary to order the entire population of a major city to "shelter in place" for almost twenty-four hours while police chased a lone teenager, albeit one who was heavily armed and dangerous.