Boston bombing suspects' mom in terror database

Michael Winter, USA TODAY | USA TODAY

Show Caption Hide Caption Boston suspects mother regrets moving to U.S. The mother of the two Boson bombing suspects said on Thursday that her children were innocent and that she regrets moving her family to the U.S. (April 25)

She and Tamerlan were added after Russia contacted the CIA in 2011

People in the database are not necessarily suspected of terrorist activity

%27Why did I even go there%3F%2C%27 she says of America

About 18 months before the Boston Marathon bombings, the CIA added the mother of the two suspects to a terrorism database after Russian authorities raised concerns that she and her oldest son were religious militants, the Associated Press reported.

Zubeidat Tsarnaeva, a naturalized U.S. citizen, was added to the the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center's TIDE watch list in fall 2011 at the same time as her son Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who died April 19 in a shootout with police outside Boston, two anonymous government officials told AP. He subsequently traveled to Russia in January 2012 and returned in July.

STORY: CIA wanted Boston suspect on terror watch list

The CIA request to add Tsarnaeva and her oldest son to the database, which includes more than 500,000 names, came roughly six months after the FBI had investigated them, at the request of Russia, and found no links to terrorism. Being on the list does not mean that U.S. authorities have proof that someone is a terrorist or possibly linked to terrorism, nor is someone subjected to surveillance or travel restrictions.

"It's all lies and hypocrisy," Tsarnaeva told the AP from the Russian republic of Dagestan.. "I'm sick and tired of all this nonsense that they make up about me and my children. People know me as a regular person, and I've never been mixed up in any criminal intentions, especially any linked to terrorism."

Records show Tsarnaeva has an open criminal case over her June 2012 arrest for allegedly shoplifting $1,624 worth of women's clothing from a Lord & Taylor store in Natick, near Boston.

FBI and Russian security agents questions the Tsarnaevs

Friday, she told CNN that she and her husband, Anzor, had left their home in Makhachkala, the capital of Dagestan, for another part of Russia, but she did not indicate where. The Tsarnaevs are ethnic Chechens from the Caucasus of southern Russia. They immigrated from Kyrgyzstan to the Boston area over the past 11 years, but the parents returned to Dagestan last year.

Tsarnaeva said her husband was delaying his trip to the United States indefinitely. He has said he would return to the states to seek "justice and the truth" in the bombing investigation, bury one son and visit the other, who has been charged with the two Patriots' Day blasts that killed three and wounded 264.

She said she has not decided whether to return to the United States, even though her lawyers assured her she would not be arrested for the outstanding theft charges.

At a news conference Thursday, the parents reiterated their belief that their sons are innocent and not connected to Islamic extremists. They also said they believe that police killed Tamerlan after he was captured alive.

Anzor Tsarnaev told reporters he would travel to the United States Thursday, but later his wife called an ambulance for him and said his departure would be delayed indefinitely. He has suffered from an unspecified illness.

The Tsarnaevas' youngest son, 19-year-old Dzhokhar, faces a possible death sentence if convicted of the bombings.

He suffered a serious neck wound and was captured hours after his 26-year-old brother was killed. The U.S. Marshals Service said Friday that he was transferred overnight from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston to at a federal prison medical facility at Fort Devens, Mass.

DZHOKHAR TSARNAEV: Moved from hospital to prison

Also Friday, FBI agents searched a landfill near the campus of the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, where Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was a student. An FBI spokesman would not say what was being sought, but sources told news outlets that it was Tsarnaev's laptop computer.

Friday evening, authorities towed away the boat in which Dzhokhar was found hiding a week ago in a homeowner's back yard in Watertown, Mass.

Explaining a possible motive for the bombings, U.S. authorities have said that the brothers apparently were angry about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and that they became radicalized from Islamic jihadi material online. At least one brother may have learned from an al-Qaeda-affiliated site how to make the pressure-cooker and pipe bombs they used in the attacks and subsequent shootout.

At the news conference Thursday in Russia, Tsarnaeva said she deeply regretted moving her family to the United States, where where they sought asylum.

"You know, my kids would be with us, and we would be, like, fine," she said. "So, yes, I would prefer not to live in America now! Why did I even go there? Why? I thought America is going to, like, protect us, our kids, it's going to be safe."

Anzor Tsarnaev explained that his son Tamerlan spent six months in Dagestan last year mainly to see relatives get a Russian passport, because he was not a U.S. citizen:

His cousin called him when there was a marriage of his cousin they asked — come to the wedding. He wanted to come to the marriage at the time, but it did not work out. The marriage took place in January, and when he went after it, when time ran out, he went to see the fiancée, spend time with the relatives. I told him: go, and at the same time you will get your passport, apply for the passport because his Kyrgyz passport was about to expire. His passport was about to expire in June or in July and that is why I said, 'You have to get a Russian passport.'

Because we left Kyrgyzstan for the States to seek political asylum in the States and Kyrgyzstan refused us citizenship. Then we applied to the Kyrgyz Embassy in Washington, sent documents not only for Tamerlan but for Alina, Bella [his wife and young daughter] to restore the passports because they could not go anywhere. He had to receive a new passport.

I was here at that time and went there together with him. We gathered documents and he had to wait. It's not done instantly, some time passes, up to six months, maybe three or four months. He left Russia on a Kyrgyz passport because we came from Kyrgyzstan; we have Kyrgyz passport. We were in Kyrgyzstan.

His Kyrgyz passport was about to expire, and he did not have time to get a Russian passport. He was told that he had to wait for one month more, but if he waited for the Russian passport he would not be able to come back to the States. ...

The Kyrgyz passport was about to expire, and if it expired then the man finds himself without citizenship, without anything. He would not be able to go anywhere, neither in Russia nor anywhere.

In New York on Thursday, New York Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly and Mayor Michael Bloomberg said that three days after the Boston attack, the Tsarnaev brothers planned to drive to New York and bomb Times Square in a spur-of-the-moment scheme that fell apart almost immediately when they realized the SUV they had hijacked was low on gas. They had five pipe bombs and a pressure-cooker explosive in the vehicle, police said.

Contributing: Associated Press