Dzhokahr Tsarnaev Claims Innocence

By Karin Friedemann, TMO

Even as a federal grand jury returned a 30-count indictment against Dzhokhar Tsarnaev for his alleged role in the Boston Marathon bombing, this week, supporters are gathering messages and poems to wish him a happy 20th birthday on July 22, which he will most likely spend at Devens Federal Medical Center in Ayers, Massachusetts, where he is now. The allegations against the young immigrant from Dagestan are being doubted world wide, and suspicions of an FBI frame up are growing. The addition of “using a firearm to intentionally kill Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Police Officer Sean Collier” to the list of charges against Tsarnaev is certainly odd, since previous police reports stated that the shooting incident was unrelated to the bombing suspects.
“This indictment is the result of exemplary cooperation between federal prosecutors and a wide range of federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies to investigate the horrific attacks on the Boston Marathon two months ago,” said Attorney General Eric Holder, who did not mention the heavy Israeli involvement in the aftermath of the bombing, investigation, and televised fundraising campaign for Homeland Security, where Israeli agents were treated deferentially by the Boston Police Department.

NBC news reported: “Under normal circumstances, the government must issue an indictment within 30 days of arrest, which would have been May 19 in Tsarnaev’s case, but no indictment had been issued.”

A probable cause hearing had been scheduled for July 2. The purpose of this hearing would have been in order to determine whether the government has a strong enough case to continue legal proceedings. Because of the grand jury indictment, the case will move directly to arraignment and trial.

Further adding to public skepticism is the FBI execution-style shooting of Ibragim Todashev in Orlando Florida last month. Todashev was someone who knew Dzhokhar’s brother Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who was killed by Boston police after being arrested and stripped naked. The FBI claimed that just before they killed Todashev, he was about to sign a confession stating that he and Tamerlan Tsarnaev were guilty of three bizarre murders that took place in Waltham, Massachusetts in 2011, where the victims were found with their throats slashed and their bodies sprinkled with marijuana. Most people assumed the victims, who were local marijuana dealers, were killed by the police, angry about the recent decriminalization of marijuana in Massachusetts, who wanted to send some kind of warning to marijuana dealers.

Another bizarre story that the FBI fed to the news media just this week – over two months after the event, is that the Tsarnaev wrote a confession message with a pen on the inside of the boat where he was hiding and was eventually captured after being shot at 200 times by the police and miraculously survived. According to CBS news, the alleged note said the bombings were retribution for what the U.S. did to Muslims in Afghanistan and Iraq, and called the Boston victims collateral damage in the way Muslims have been in the U.S.-driven wars. “When you attack one Muslim, you attack all Muslims,” the note allegedly says.

A member of the Free Jahar Movement, Cindy Chapman, told TMO she doesn’t buy that story. “If he was injured as he is – and was shot in his left hand – And he is left handed. He came out of the boat holding his left arm kinda funny. And the way he was pictured laying in the boat he was laying on his right side. I guess his right side is also hurt I am not really sure. But he could NOT have not written it. And why did they NOT find that note or notes sooner. I mean really why are they just coming out now with it? I mean like really – just before the trial?”

While Tsarnaev is not allowed to discuss his case with anyone except his lawyer, his mother Zubeidat Tsarnaeva told the Associated Press that her son told her he is innocent. “I could just feel that he was being driven crazy by the unfairness that happened to us, that they killed our innocent Tamerlan.” She also told reporters that Tamerlan called her just before his death saying “The police are chasing us and shooting at us” and told her, “I love you, Mama.”

Tsarnaev’s supporters have taken to the internet to demand a fair trial. The Dzokhar Tsarnaev Jahar Facebook page, which has more than 8,000 members, states that the 19-year-old’s “life has been stolen and has been made into a public object of hate, created by the inaccurate reports by the media.” His fans are also twittering using the hashtag #freejahar and handles that include @FreeJaha @Fighting4Jahar and @PrayForJaharr. Some news reports claim that young people are even getting tattooed with his name.

A rapper named Beacorn wrote a rap song called “Free Jahar Tsar” that goes, “A boy with his cap backwards, hoodie down and white bag just / walking behind his brother past surveillance cameras / He wasn’t even tryna be hidin’ his facial appearance / And  that’s all it took to take his rights as an everyday American? / Besides the bags shown blown to bits were both black / so how does that account as hard evidence after the fact?”

The birthday messages being collected from all over the world for the young man – mainly from strangers – are deeply moving – full of prayers, intense love, encouragement, telling him not to give up and that he’s not alone, with unshakable faith in his innocence.  Many people, when they learned about Tsarnaev’s ordeal, realized that if this could happen to him it could happen to any young Muslim, and it immediately made them decide to start practicing their religion and in some cases, convert to Islam. Someone in Boston wrote, “I’m so glad you opened my eyes, Jahar. I’m so glad I snapped out of being brainwashed by the media.”

Tsarnaev will need that level of support to spread to the wider population if he is going to receive anything that even resembles a fair trial. All Americans should want Tsarnaev to get a fair trial, to make sure they got the right guy – because if he’s not the marathon bomber, then whoever actually did it is still at large.

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