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The surviving Boston Marathon bombings suspect was tonight charged with using a weapon of mass destruction against persons and property resulting in death, the US Department of Justice said.

In a statement, US Attorney General Eric Holder detailed the charge against 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. He faces a possible death sentence.

Tsarnaev made his first appearance before a magistrate judge in his room at the Beth Israel hospital in Boston, where he is in a serious but stable condition.

Officials said Tsarnaev and his older brother Tamerlan set off the twin explosions at last Monday's marathon, killing three people and injuring more than 180.

Tsarnaev, who is communicating with investigators in hand-written notes from his hospital bed, is understood to have confessed crucial details about unexploded bombs and whether anyone else was involved in the plot apart from his brother.

The university student is thought to have shot himself in the throat in a failed suicide bid as police closed in and is too seriously wounded to talk. He is reported to be answering questions “sporadically”, said law enforcement officials.

Police found the teenager hiding in a boat in the driveway of a home in the Boston suburb of Watertown on Friday. It came after a day of high drama with a city-wide manhunt for the teenager after his older brother Tamerlan, 26, was killed following a gun and grenade battle with police.

The surviving brother is being held under armed guard at Beth Israel's Deaconess Medical Centre, where 11 victims of the explosions are still being treated.

Tsarnaev will not be tried as an enemy combatant in a US military tribunal, but will be prosecuted in the federal court system. Tsarnaev is a naturalised US citizen and, as such, cannot be tried in a military commissions.

Classmates of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth have told how they saw him at the campus gym last Tuesday, the day after the bombings, and he said that the blasts were a “tragedy”.

Zach Bettencourt, 20, a political science student, said: “He was like: ‘Yeah tragedies like this happen all the time, like in Afghanistan, too, you know, all over the world’.”

Video: Dramatic moment Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is caught

Prosecutors are thought to be considering charging Tsarnaev with the use of a weapon of mass destruction, which carries a death sentence. However, Massachusetts, where the blasts took place, does not have the death penalty.

US officials said the teenager was being questioned without reading him his Miranda rights, which guarantees the right to remain silent and the right to a lawyer.

A key focus of the investigation since the brothers were hunted down is a six-month trip Tamerlan Tsarnaev took to the semi-autonomous Russian province of Dagestan in 2012.

Dagestan has become a hotbed of militant Islamic activity. Russian secret services are now investigating the links.

The FBI acknowledged it interviewed Tamerlan Tsarnaev two years ago at the request of Russian authorities, but after looking at his telephone records, websites he visited and associates, the FBI found he had no links to terrorism.

It comes as his mother Zubeidat said she was responsible for encouraging him to turn to Islam fearing he was sinking into a life of marijuana, girls and alcohol.

Tamerlan’s widow and mother of his three-year-old daughter Zahara, Katherine Russell, has been interviewed by federal agents.

Friends said the “all-American” daughter of a doctor was “ brainwashed” by her extremist husband, whom she met while she was a student at Sussex University in Boston.

Russell converted to Islam and left university in 2010 without graduating.

She visited the home she shared with her husband in Cambridge, Massachusetts to collect personal belongings and a pet cat before returning to her parents’ home in Rhode Island. Ms Russell’s lawyer Amato DeLuca said she had not suspected her husband of anything and was never given any cause to suspect him of being involved in any terrorist activity.

Mr DeLuca said his client had been working 70 to 80 hours, seven days a week, as a home health care aide. While she was at work, her husband cared for their toddler daughter.

Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick today asked residents to observe a moment of silence at 2.50 p.m - the time the first of the two bombs exploded last week. Bells will ring across state after the minute-long tribute to the victims.

Many Boston residents are returning to workplaces and schools for the first time since the bombings.