Alvi and Ruslan Tsarni, the two uncles of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects, spoke about their nephews on Friday.
Ruslan Tsarni, the uncle of Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, did not mince his words when describing his relatives.
Speaking with the Baltimore Sun, Ruslan Tsarni called the two “losers,” calling on Dzhokhar, 19, who is still alive, to turn himself in. His brother, 26-year-old Tamerlan Tsarnaev, was killed in a police standoff on Friday.
“I’ve been following [the story] from day one but never ever imagined that somehow the children of my brother would be associated with that,” Tsarni, a Maryland resident, told the paper. “It is an atrocity. We are devastated. We’re shocked. We’ve not been in touch with that family for a number of years. They never lived here. I never knew, and even if I would have guessed something, I would have submitted them myself.”
Tsarni said that he has not seen his nephews since 2005 for personal reasons but said he did not think they had ties to any terrorist groups.
“They do not deserve to be on this earth ... What can I say? They murdered,” he said, according to WTSP television, while calling them two “barbarians.”
“Being losers, hatred to those who were able to settle themselves, these are the only reasons I can imagine. Anything else, anything else to do with religion is a fraud. It’s a fake. We’re Muslims. We’re ethnic Chechyans,” he added to the Sun.
He said the two brought a “shame” to the entire Chechyan ethnicity for allegedly carrying out the bombings.
Tsarni said one of the suspects were born in Kyrgyzstan and said his brother’s family moved to Boston 10 years ago.
Alvi Tsarnaev, another uncle who lives near Tsarni, said that “I can’t believe this what happened. I can’t believe this, it’s not possible.”
Alvi added that he had not seen the two since 2009 and believed their parents moved back to Russia.
The father of the suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing described his fugitive son as a smart and accomplished “angel” in an anguished interview in which he claimed they were set up.
Anzor Tsarnaev spoke with The Associated Press by telephone in the southern Russian republic of Dagestan after police said one of his sons, Tamerlan, had been killed in a shootout and the other, Dzhokhar, was being intensely pursued.
“My son is a true angel,” said the elder Tsarnaev . He said his son was “an intelligent boy” who was studying medicine.
“We expected him to come on holidays here,” he said.
“They were set up, they were set up!” he exclaimed. “I saw it on television; they killed my older son Tamerlan.”
Tsarnaev, badly agitated, gave little more information and ended the call angrily, saying, “Leave me alone, my son’s been killed.”
The AP reached Tsarnaev through a phone number provided by a relative in the United States.
The younger Tsarnaev gave few clues as to his inner life on his profile on Vkontakte, a Russian equivalent of Facebook, though he did include websites about Islam among his favorites.
The family’s origins are in Chechnya, the mostly Muslim Russian republic where separatist rebels fought two full-scale wars with Russian forces since 1994.
A spokesman for Chechnya’s leader said the family left Chechnya long ago and went to Central Asia, then moved to Dagestan, a Muslim republic adjacent to Chechnya that has been the site of a sporadic insurgency for more than a decade.
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev attended School No. 1 in Makhachkala, the capital of Dagestan. The principal’s secretary at School No. 1, Irina Bandurina, told the AP that Tsarnaev left for the U.S. in March 2002.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
