Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the remaining suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings assured his parents in a phone conversation that he and his slain brother were innocent, his mother Zubeidat Tsarnaeva told the Associated Press on Tuesday.
Tsarnaev, who walked without a wheelchair, spoke with his mother last week for the first time since he had been in custody, following the deadly bombings at the marathon, which killed three people and injured over 260 people at the finish line on April 15.
Tsarnaev reportedly told his mother that he was getting better, walking, and had a very good doctor. He also reportedly told her that he was struggling to understand what happened last month.
"He didn't hold back his emotions, as if screaming to the whole world: What is this? What's happening?," Tsarnaeva told the AP.
"I couldn't stop myself from crying," Tsarnaeva said in a phone interview with Bloomberg News. "He said: I am absolutely fine, my wounds are healing. Everything is in God's hands. Be patient. Everything will be fine."
The conversation lasted about six minutes, she said.
Tsarnaeva had insisted Dzhokhar and his brother Tamerlan were victims of a conspiracy, and denied her sons and had anything to do with the bombings.
"All I can do is pray to God and hope that one day fairness will win out, our children will be cleared, and we will at least get Dzhokhar back, crippled, but at least alive," Anzor Tsarnaev said to reporters.
Meanwhile, at a news conference in Moscow, the father of Ibragim Todashev, a mixed martial arts fighter who was killed during FBI question accused agents of being "bandits," responsible for "executing" his son. Abdul-Baki Todashev showed journalists 16 photographs that he said were of his son in a Florida morgue.
He said his son had six gunshot wounds to his torso, and one to the back of his head. It was not immediately possible to authenticate the photographs, the AP reported
Todashev was being questioned by an FBI agent and two Massachusetts state troopers about his ties to Tamerlan Tsarnaev, and to a connection to 2011 triple murder in Massachussets.
When his son was shot and killed by authorities, Todashev said his son was killed "execution-style," and that he was "100 percent unarmed."
"I'd only seen and heard things like that in the movies - they shoot somebody and then a shot in the head to make sure," Todashev said.
"These just aren't FBI agents, they're bandits," he added.
