Boston authorities in Watertown, Massachusetts captured Dzokhar Tsarnaev, an ethnic Chechen and naturalized American citizen, who was then taken to an area hospital in serious condition. Tsarnaev, the second suspect in the bombings at the Boston Marathon, had been apprehended at approximately 8:45 on Friday evening, the Associated Press reported.
"We got him," Boston ayor Tom Menino tweeted, and later told reporters, "The people of greater Boston will able to sleep tonight."
Reports surfaced that official sources said that Tsarnaev was "pinned and alive," in a boat stored in the backyard of a Watertown home, where the resident there saw blood and called authorities.
Dzokhar's brother Tamerlan, who was the first suspect of the bombings, was killed in a shoot-out with police in the early hours of Friday. The two are believed to have also shot and killed campus officer Sean Collier. Another transit police officer Richard Donahue was also seriously injured in the gunfight on Thursday evening.
Boston had been on a near-complete lockdown since the gunbattle that killed Tamerlan Tsarnaev. After killing Collier, they carjacked an automobile and were reportedly part of a convenience-store robbery, news reports said. After Tamerlan died, Dzokhar fled, and eluded authorities for about 18 hours.
Three people were killed and 176 others injured -- many of them seriously -- in the April 15 dual bombing near the finish line of the Boston Marathon. An 8-year-old boy, a Chinese graduate student, and a young restaurant manager, Radio Free Europe reported. Many were also seriously injured in the bombings; many reports of people who had limbs and legs blown off. They continue to be treated at local hospitals throughout Boston.
It was the worst terror attack on U.S. soil since the Al-Qaeda attacks with hijacked passenger airliners on September 11, 2011 killed nearly 3,000 people.
A U.S. government official said the FBI interviewed Tamerlan Tsarnaev at the request of an unidentified foreign government in 2011 but that nothing suspicious had been found.
U.S. President Barack Obama discussed the Boston bombings with Russian President Vladimir Putin in a telephone call on Friday. Putin offered condolences over the Boston bomb attacks and the two leaders pledged to continue "cooperation" on counterterrorism, news reports said.
Tamerlan was born in Tokmok, Kyrgyzstan, and Dzhokhar was born in the southern Russian republic of Daghestan, news reports said.
A Justice Department official said the government is invoking a seldom-used public safety exception permitting officials to engage in a limited and focused unwarned interrogation of a suspect without first reading him his Miranda Rights.
After being treated, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who is now in custody, will be questioned by a special interrogation team for high-value supects. The public safety exception not only permits unwarned questioning of a suspect, allowing the government to introduce any statement yielded by such interrogation as evidence in court. The exception last 48 hours and should be extended by declaring Tsarnaev an enemy combatant, under the Law of War, Fox News reported.
