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According to an interview with Russia’s Interfax news agency, he said, “I learned about the incident from TV. My opinion is: the special services have framed my children, because they are practicing Muslims. Why did they kill Tamerlan? He was supposed to be caught alive. The younger is on the run now. He was a sophomore at a medical school in the U.S. We expected him to come home for vacation… I believe special services have framed my children.”

The last time Maret Tsarnaev spoke to her nephew Tamarlan, in February, he was on the phone from the family hometown of Makhachkala, in the Russian republic of Dagestan, on the western shore of the Caspian Sea. She joked that he must be meeting pretty girls, but Tamarlan laughed it off, saying he is a family man, married to a woman in Boston from a “good Christian family,” with whom he has a daughter about to turn three.

She said it was his first trip there since 2003, and he was staying with his mother’s relatives, “figuring out what to do next,” now that he had left university and stopped boxing.

Tamarlan, 26, was killed in a dramatic clash with police in Boston early Friday. Dzhokar, 19, the youngest child and a student of marine biology and a wrestler at the University of Massachusssets Dartmouth, escaped and was the target of a massive manhunt on Friday. They have two sisters.

Ms. Tsaraev said she called the FBI after learning of her nephews’ alleged involvement, in a phone call from a friend in Kazakhstan. She has not seen them in person in five years, but said she thought she recognized the photos released by the FBI.