Pre-burial rituals carried out as FBI continues investigations at Tsarnaev family's Cambridge home
The uncle of the suspected Boston marathon bomber who was killed in a firefight with police has visited a funeral home in Worcester, Massachusetts, to wash Tamerlan Tsarnaev's body and administer burial rites.
Ruslan Tsarni attended the Graham Putnum & Mahoney Funeral Parlors on Sunday, with three other men, to carry out the rituals which are required under Muslim tradition to be performed as quickly as possible after death. But the fate of the corpse of Tsarnaev, who was 26 when he died at the culmination of a massive police hunt for the suspected bombers, remains unknown and the subject of some controversy.
Peter Stefan, the funeral home director, has been holding the body under refrigeration with a police detail posted outside the building, as protesters picketed through the weekend. "Throw him off a boat like Osama bin Laden!" one man shouted, according to Associated Press. Another protester carried a sign saying: "Bury the garbage in the landfill".
Stefan said he saw it as his duty to see the body buried in a Muslim section of a cemetery. "Is he a terrorist?" he told ABC News. "Sure he is a terrorist, but I can't control what he did. The person is dead, and burying a dead body, that's all it is."
Cemeteries in Massachusetts and neighbouring states across the north-east have refused to accept the elder Tsarnaev brother for burial. Tamerlan's younger brother, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, is in custody in a medical prison at Fort Devens in Massachusetts, having been captured hours after his brother's death.
Tamerlan Tsranaev died at 1.35am on 19 April, four days after two explosions ripped through the finishing line of the Boston Marathon, killing three people and injuring more than 260. The official cause of death, listed in a death certificate that is on file at the funeral parlour, was "gunshot wounds of torso and extremities" combined with "blunt trauma to head and torso". The certificate adds that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was "shot by police then run over and dragged by motor vehicle". The FBI has previously indicated that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev drove over his brother as he made his getaway.
As the wrangling over the body continued, police extended their investigations at the Cambridge Tsarnaev family home. Norfolk Street, where the house is located, remained closed.
Federal investigators have indicated that they believe the two explosive devices, which were fashioned out of pressure cookers, were made at the house. They have been questioning Tamerlan's widow, Katherine Russell, who also lived in the property but who has denied through her lawyer any knowledge of the preparations for the bombings.
It was unclear whether a second autopsy would be carried out on Tamerlan Tsarnaev's body. His parents had indicated that they wanted a second post-mortem examination, as they continue to dispute their sons' involvement in the Marathon outrage. The mother of the suspects, Zubeidat Tsarnaeva, has repeatedly accused US authorities of conspiring against her sons. She is herself a subject of interest for FBI investigators who have been exploring her role in the radicalization process of Tamerlan, who became more fundamentalist in his devotion to Islam over the past two years.
Zubeidat and her husband, Anzor Tsarnaev, had wanted to come to the US to retrieve their son's body, but decided not to for fear that they might themselves be arrested.
Stefan said that unless he could find a cemetery prepared to accept the bombing suspect for burial, he would have to call on the intervention of senior political figures such as the mayor of Boston, Thomas Menino, and the governor of Massachusetts, Deval Patrick.