Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev scrawled a confession note as a huge police dragnet closed in on the backyard boat where he was hiding, it was revealed Thursday.
Using a pen he found in the boat, the badly bleeding 19-year-old scrawled the note on an interior wall of the boat, admitting responsibility for the April 15 attack,
reports CBS News.
In his note, Tsarnaev said he did not mourn the death of his older brother Tamerlan, who was killed in a police shootout hours before. He said his fellow suspect in the bombings is now a martyr in paradise, and that he believed that he would be joining him there.
Tsarnaev wrote that the bombings were retribution for U.S. military actions against Muslims in Afghanistan and Iraq, and called the Boston victims "collateral damage," like the Muslims killed in America's wars.
"When you attack one Muslim, you attack all Muslims," he wrote.
The note that was found in the cabin of the bullet-riddled boat backs up many of the statements Tsarnaev made in the days before an attorney started representing him, and so could potentially be a key part of evidence in the case against Tsarnaev, said CBS correspondent John Miller.
Much of Tsarnaev's testimony will likely be disputed for coming before he was read his Miranda rights, Miller said.
The brothers did not appear to leave other statements behind, such as a martyrdom video or a more formal claim of responsibility, as larger terror organizations tend to do.
Tsarnaev hid in the boat that was stored in a backyard in Watertown, Mass., after he and his brother allegedly shot and killed an MIT police officer. He is currently in a federal prison hospital in Massachusetts awaiting trial on charges surrounding the bombing that killed three and injured 264.
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