Russian officials believe they provided the U.S. with enough information to prevent the Boston Marathon bombings, The Boston Globe reports.
Russia warned the U.S. that Tamerlan Tsarnaev — the bombing suspect who died in a police shootout days after the April attack — planned to join an Islamic insurgency.
U.S. authorities could have prevented the bombings by acting on these warnings, senior members of the Russian Federal Security Service told U.S. Representative William R. Keating of Massachusetts.
The attack, which Tamerlan, 26, is suspected of carrying out along with his 19-year-old brother Dzhokhar, killed three people and injured about 260 others.
Keating said the Russian security agency FSB showed him information including "the names, the addresses, the cellphone numbers, the iPad accounts, e-mail, Facebook pages . . . the fact that he was trying to get involved to go to Palestine and deal with insurgencies there" that apparently led the CIA to add Tamerlan to a terrorist suspect database.
Tamerlan had also visited Dagestan and a region bordering Chechnya, which are conflict-ridden and predominantly Muslim areas of Russia.
But U.S. and Russian officials disagree about what would have been sufficient information to detain Tamerlan, according to The Globe.
The U.S. failed to tip off Russian officials that Tamerlan was traveling to Russia, and the Russians "took the nonreply as a sign that this was not important and this was not a threat," Keating said.
Keating said "cooperation has improved greatly" between the U.S. and Russia since the bombings, but it seems communication was previously lacking.
The FSB reportedly received no response from the CIA when the agency asked the CIA to look into Tamerlan's activities after he left Russia.
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