NEWS
May 22, 2013 | By Richard A. Serrano
WASHINGTON - A friend of alleged Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev who was shot and killed by an FBI special agent in Orlando, Fla., early Wednesday was being questioned primarily about a 2-year-old triple homicide in Waltham, Mass., and about whether Tsarnaev played a role in those killings, officials said. Federal law enforcement sources identified the slain man as Ibragim Todashev, 27. They said he suddenly lunged with a knife and injured the agent in a “violent confrontation” during an interview. Todashev is a former Mixed Martial Arts fighter like Tsarnaev and was being questioned by the FBI agent, two Massachusetts State Police troopers and other law enforcement officials.
NATIONAL
May 16, 2013 | By Richard A. Serrano, Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON - The head of the FBI said Thursday that there were lapses in tracking accused Boston bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev's visit to Russia last year, saying that U.S. security officials failed to act on "text" alerts to a U.S. Customs agent about his trip. The inaction came after U.S. officials interviewed Tsarnaev and his parents about Russian concerns that he was traveling there "intent on returning and perhaps participating in jihad," FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III said. Mueller told a Senate appropriations subcommittee that in March 2011, Russian authorities asked the U.S. for a background assessment on Tsarnaev and his mother.
CALIFORNIA | LOCAL
May 8, 2013 | By Andrew Blankstein and Robert J. Lopez, Los Angeles Times
Four people who provided crucial information in the hunt for former Los Angeles Police Officer Christopher Dorner will split what is expected to be a $1-million reward in the case, authorities announced Tuesday afternoon. The division of the highly anticipated reward, sought by at least 12 people after a February gun battle that led to Dorner's death, was overseen by three retired judges and made public in a 12-page report released by the Los Angeles Police Department. The money will be paid in installments to a couple held captive by Dorner, a ski resort employee and a tow truck driver.
NATIONAL
May 1, 2013 | By Brian Bennett and Kim Murphy, Los Angeles Times
WASHINGTON - Shortly after the FBI released photos of two Boston bombing suspects on April 18, several college friends texted Dzhokhar Tsarnaev on their cellphones. One said Tsarnaev looked like suspect No. 2, who wore a white cap backward over tufts of brown curls. "LOL," Tsarnaev texted back. Later, he wrote again: "Come to my room and take whatever you want. " That night, according to an FBI complaint filed Wednesday in Boston, three young men entered Tsarnaev's dorm room at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, where they all had met as students, and removed a laptop and a backpack full of fireworks that had been emptied of gunpowder.
CALIFORNIA | LOCAL
April 25, 2013 | By Kate Mather and Andrew Blankstein
The man suspected of kidnapping a 10-year-old girl from her Northridge home and sexually assaulting her appeared in a Los Angeles courtroom Thursday, but did not enter a plea. The arraignment for Tobias Dustin Summers was instead pushed back to May 2. Summers, a 32-year-old felon and reputed gang member, was captured early Wednesday at a drug and alcohol rehabilitation facility in Las Misiones, a small community about 200 miles south of the U.S. border, authorities said. He was taken to a Los Angeles jail later that day and held in lieu of $19-million bail.
NATIONAL
April 25, 2013 | By David Horsey
Like finding new friends on Facebook or a great deal on EBay, it is easy to locate fiery, radical Islamist imams on the Internet who will guide the willing toward the path of bomb making, random slaughter and martyrdom. Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the accused Boston Marathon bomber who died in a shootout with police a week ago, seems to have connected with a number of these firebrand theologians in exactly that way. Tsarnaev did not pick up his militant ideas at his local mosque. In fact, it is being reported that, on two occasions, Tsarnaev interrupted Friday prayer services at a mosque in Cambridge to criticize the speaker for being too liberal and accommodating.