The two brothers suspected of carrying out the Boston Marathon bombings reportedly came to the United States from Chechnya over a decade ago, but apparently never fit in with local culture.
According to multiple reports, the older brother 26-year-old Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who was killed in an overnight shootout with police, told a photographer in 2009, “I don’t have a single American friend. I don’t understand them.”
His 19-year-old brother, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, is still on the loose and the subject of a widespread manhunt in the Boston area.
The photographer, Johannes Him, created an online photojournalism slideshow chronicling the older brother, who reportedly dreamed of making the U.S. Olympics boxing team, working out in a gym.
One of the captions read, “Tamerlan fled Chechnya with his family because of the conflict in the early 1990s, and lived there for years in Kazakhstan before getting to the United States as a refugee.”
Ruslan Tsarni spoke to reporters outside his home in the Washington suburb of Gaithersburg, Md., and said he last saw his nephews, Dzhokhar and Tamerlan, in 2005.
He stated that their actions had nothing to do with religion or Chechnya, saying instead that they never acclimated to life in America.
He called on his youngest nephew to turn himself in and ask for forgiveness from the victims and their families.
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