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April 23rd, 2013 
Peter Nolan The brothers are suspected of planting bombs hidden in pressure cookers and leaving them near the finishing line of the running race, where they exploded.
Mrs Tarnaev, an ethnic Avar from the Russian republic of Dagestan, met The Daily Telegraph in its capital Makhachkala, a shabby town on the Caspian coast, alongside her husband Anzor, the young men’s Chechen father. She said her son Tamerlan had never contemplated violence.
“Reading extremist materials does not make you a terrorist,” she said.
“Tamerlan told the FBI men, ‘I read many things; I read Pushkin and Doestoyevsky too.’ He was an erudite boy.” Mr Tsarnaev, 47, an intense man with cropped silver hair said that he had “thousands of questions” about the fate of Tamerlan and Dzhokhar, and that he and his wife planned to travel to the United States this week to “save” his younger son.
He claimed that Dzhokhar’s relatives in the US had not been allowed to visit him in hospital in Boston, where he is being treated for serious wounds. “They’re not letting anyone from the family see him,” he said.
“All we know is what we hear from television.” A former lawyer who worked as a mechanic when he lived in the United States, Mr Tsarnaev said he and his wife planned to bury Tamerlan with Muslim rites at a cemetery in Boston, or nearby.
His wife, a slender woman in a long floral skirt and with carefully applied black eyeliner, claimed her sons had been “set up” by US security services and police, who she said had bought explosives especially in order to frame the brothers. “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 said. “It’s a big show, a spectacle. Americans love a show.” The exact motive for the brothers’ alleged terror attack remains unclear. It was reported on Monday that Tamerlan had visited a mosque frequented by conservative Salafi Muslims during a six-month to Dagestan last year. Russian security services in the region said they had noted him meeting a man suspected of links with Islamist guerrillas on four occasions but found no reason to charge or detain him.
Mrs Tsarnaeva said FBI agents contacted her son by telephone a final time three days after the marathon bombing – and one day before he died. “They said he was suspected of involvement and told him he needed to come in for questioning,” she said. “He told them to come and find him and hung up. He was fed up with talking to them.” It has become increasingly clear, however, that – whatever the trigger for the bombing – Tamerlan was drawn to a conservative strain of Islam in recent years. Mrs Tsarnaeva told The Daily Telegraph that she and her elder son had begun to explore their Muslim heritage together in mid-2011.
“He had been drinking, smoking and going to night clubs and I really didn’t like that,” she explained. “He was starting lead a kind of American life that I didn’t like. Instead of coming to kiss me when he returned home he started sneaking past to the bathroom to brush his teeth and hide the alcohol on his breath.” “So then I said to him, I don’t like night-time adventures, your smoking and drinking. You should read up on what that means in Islam – it is ‘haraam’; forbidden. And that’s how he began to study the Koran and go deeper into Islam. And from that moment he gave up [the bad habits] and we started to go deeper together, and pray together.” Mrs Tarnaeva said her son’s new path had in turn strengthened her own faith. “Tamerlan said to me, ‘You know mama, you are pushing me toward the truth, but I would like you to wear a hijab. A woman in Islam should be concealed.'” After that, she began to wear the wrapped headscarf.
Asked for her thoughts on her surviving son, Dzhokhar, Mrs Tarnaeva added: “This is my pain. These are the children whom I brought up with dignity and whom I carried in my arms. And I am proud of what they are, and of what Dzhokhar is, because I believe they are innocent. I am not ashamed and I am ready to shout that to the whole world.”
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