Earlier today we learned that the 19-year-old man charged with the Boston Marathon bombing has told federal investigators that his now-deceased older brother was the driving force behind the attack. Now the family and friends of that older brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, are assigning blame to an unidentified Muslim convert who ostensibly brainwashed the 26-year-old Chechen immigrant.

The Associated Press was unable to determine the man's identity; friends and family only knew his first name: Misha. "Somehow, he just took his brain," Tamerlan's uncle, Ruslan Tsarni, told the AP. "I heard about nobody else but this convert. The seed for changing his views was planted right there in Cambridge." Misha, an Armenian native, is described by those who met him as a slightly older, heavyset bald man with a long reddish beard. Tsarnaev reportedly met him around 2009.

Elmirza Khozhugov, 26, the ex-husband of Tamerlan's sister, Ailina, recalls that when he asked Tamerlan why he gave up boxing and writing music, Tamerlan told him, "Misha said it's not really good to create music. It's not really good to listen to music." Khozhugov says Tamerlan became increasingly interested in the conspiracy theory website Infowars, and was also trying to track down a copy of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. But he tells the AP, "He never said he hated America or he hated the Jews." Another friend insists, "He had nothing against the American people. He had something against the American government."

Meanwhile, Tamerlan's wife is said to be cooperating with investigators. Katherine Russell, an American-born convert to Islam who married Tsarnaev in 2010, says she did not know anything about the bombings. Her attorney tells Reuters she was busy taking care of the couple's 2-1/2-year-old daughter and working as a home healthcare aide while her husband allegedly plotted the attack without her knowledge. "The reports of involvement by her husband and brother-in-law came as an absolute shock to them all," Russell's lawyer says.

Russell's former roommates from college recall Tsarnaev as an abusive misogynist. They recall him calling Russell a "slut" and a "prostitute" and threw furniture at her during fights, according to an NPR report. Russell became pregnant during her senior year, and as Tsarnaev became more extreme, she started wearing a hijab. Friends say "she cut off contact with them, and she also cut off contact with her family members which her friends had been in contact with." Her attorney insists, "It is pretty evident that she didn't know anything."

