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April 22nd, 2013 
Peter Nolan While they have not struck abroad, the Caucasus militants support fellow radicals in the Middle East and have also carried out numerous attacks on Russian soil, including the suicide bombings on the Moscow metro and at the city’s Domodedovo airport, which killed scores of civilians in 2010 and 2011.
In Makhachkala, shootouts are common and the militants frequently kill “idolatrous” faith healers or torch shops selling alcohol.
The Tsarnaevs’ Chechen father Anzor, and their mother, Zubeidat, an ethnic Avar from Dagestan, have denied their children were extremists.
Those claims were supported by the fact that that Anzor is a supporter of Ramzan Kadyrov, the pro-Kremlin leader of Chechnya, and not of Chechen independence which is supported by militant Islamist groups.
The couple did not answer phone messages requesting comment, but neighbours near their house in a dusty back street said the family had “nothing to do with the fanatics”.
But referring to the two bombers, Magomed, a taxi driver waiting for clients on a central avenue of Makhachkala on Sunday, said he saw fire where there was smoke.
“If they were normal, secular guys, then why did they go and blow up innocent people?” he said, when asked what could have driven Tamerlan Tsarnaev – killed on Friday – and his captured brother Dzhokhar to bomb the Boston marathon.
“We’ve got ‘beardies’ running all over the place here, threatening and killing ordinary folks. Their brains turn to porridge and they think they should destroy anyone who doesn’t share their ideas. Maybe Tamerlan came back here and got caught up with the wrong crowd.”
The older Tsarnaev’s brother’s precise movements when he visited Russia last year are still unclear. Flight records show he travelled from New York to Moscow on January 12, and flew back on July 17.
However, two neighbours in Makhachkala told The Daily Telegraph they had only seen him at his parents’ house in the summer.
Unnamed Russian security sources told the state-owned news agency RIA Novosti on Sunday they had no record of links between Tamerlan Tsarnaev and Umarov, the militant leader who was placed on the US State Department’s list of terrorists in 2010.
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