Bombing suspects’ mother Zubeidat Tsarnaeva spoke recently that she fears her son will be sentenced to death.
Tsarnaeva and her husband are planing to fly to the United States from southern Russia to visit their younger son, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who is said to be in serious condition after he was captured on Friday for allegedly helping carry out the Boston Marathon bombing that killed three people and injured 180.
Her other son, 26-year-old Tamerlan Tsarnaev, was killed on Thursday evening during a police shootout.
“I lost two sons,” she told ABC News. “My family is in the dirt.”
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was arrested on Friday night in Watertown, Mass., after a standoff with police. He was found in a boat located in a man’s backyard.
The interview came a day after Tsarnaeva told Russia Today that she believed her sons were set up by the FBI.
“What I can say is I am really sure, I am like 100-percent sure that this is a set-up,” she said.
She added: “My two sons are really innocent, and I know that neither of them never, never have talked about whatever they’re saying about now, and what I want to say is … my youngest one was raised actually … from 8 years, he was raised in America, and my oldest son, he is like really, really proper raised in our house, never, nobody talked about terrorism.”
Tsarnaeva also said that Tamerlan, who visited Russia for six months in 2012, became increasingly religious in later years, but he showed no signs of being part of an extremist movement.
“And my son Tamerlan really got involved in the religion, you know, religious politics five years ago, so he… never, never told me that he would be like on the side of jihad,” she said. “He was counseled by FBI for three, five years. They knew what my son was doing. They knew what actions and what sites on the Internet he was going. How could this happen? How could they — they were following every step of him and they’re telling today this is a terrorist act.”
However, Tsarnaeva told ABC that the FBI wanted to do away with him.
“They were all afraid of Tamerlan,” she said, speaking about the U.S. government. “They wanted to eliminate him as a threat because he was in love with Islam. For the last five years they were following him.”
