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(Image: New York Daily News)

A final meal half-eaten on the table and unwashed clothes strewn across the floor, this is the squalid lair abandoned by the Boston bombers as the net closed.

As brothers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev saw their faces being shown on TV by the FBI last Thursday they knew it was only a matter of time before the knock on the door came.

In a panic the terrorists fled the second floor flat, taking six homemade bombs, handguns and a rifle with them.

Hours later Tamerlan, 26, was dead and Dzhokhar, 19, was wounded and on the loose.

(Image: New York Daily News)

The apartment, where the worst terrorist attack on US soil since 9/11 was plotted, lies behind a flimsy plywood door at the top of a rickety staircase.

The clapboard building in Cambridge, north of Boston, was also home to Tamerlan’s wife, Muslim convert Katherine Russell, 24, and their three-year-old daughter Zahara.

Its unpainted floorboards have been left littered with sport kit, bottles and cigarette packets.

And as the truth behind the image of domesticity emerged, neighbours expressed horror at the evil planned upstairs.

(Image: New York Daily News)

Albrecht Ammon, 18, said: “I lived right underneath and they were making bombs. It’s scary.

“They acted like a normal family. I want to know why.”

Photos taken of the brothers’ last stand in Watertown in the early hours of Friday morning show how they fired at police before Tamerlan was killed.

A resident’s phone camera images show the pair sheltering behind a vehicle and aiming at officers.

(Image: New York Daily News)

They are seen running to a car for more supplies before hauling out a pressure cooker bomb they then detonated, filling the street with smoke.

The surviving brother has claimed Tamerlan planned the bombings because he “wanted to defend Islam from attack”.

In scrawled notes made from his hospital bed Dzhokhar told the High-Value Interrogation Group he and his brother were not linked to any groups.

And officials say evidence from the interrogation suggests the suspects did not have any accomplices, despite fears they were part of a sleeper cell of 12.

Speaking from her home in Dagestan yesterday the pair’s mother Zubeidat Tsarnaeva said she did not believe they were responsible for the blasts which killed three and injured 280.

The youngest bomb victim, eight-year-old Martin Richard was laid to rest yesterday.

The funeral of rookie cop Sean Collier, 26, who was shot in his car by the Tsarnaevs on Thursday, was also held.