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The mother of the Boston Marathon bomber has praised her son as “the best of the best” and denounced Americans as “terrorists.”

Zubeidat Tsarnaeva, 48, defended Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who was convicted of the April 2013 attack on Wednesday, saying online: “I will never forget it. May god bless those who helped my son.

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“The terrorists are the Americans and everyone knows it. My son is the best of the best.”

Tsarnaeva has remained in Russia since the attack, partly because she faces possible arrest in the U.S. on shoplifting charges.

However, she has maintained the innocence both of Dzhokhar and her elder son, Tamerlan, who died while fleeing police, and has followed her 21-year-old surviving son’s trial closely.

“Tamerlan was a convenient person to hang this on because they’d already been monitoring him, and Dzhokhar just got dragged into it by chance,” she told The Daily Telegraph shortly after the bombing. “It’s a big show, a spectacle. Americans love a show.”

Survivors of the bombing and families of the victims expressed their relief after a jury found Tsarnaev guilty of all 30 charges.

Bill Richard, the father of eight-year-old Martin Richard, the youngest victim of the attack, embraced one of the prosecutors in court after the verdict was read out. Liz Norden, whose two adult sons both lost their right legs to the brothers’ pressure cooker bomb, said she hoped Tsarnaev was sentenced to death.