Accused
Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev told his friends about
martyrdom and bomb-building over lunch before the attacks last year, an
FBI agent testified on Friday in the trial of one of the friends for
obstruction.
Azamat Tazhayakov is the first of Tsarnaev's friends to face trial.
He
is charged with removing evidence from Tsarnaev's room at the
University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and throwing away a backpack
containing fireworks casings as the FBI searched for the suspect,
accused of killing three people and injuring 264 in the April 2013
bombings.
'Dzhokhar had explained
that people who die in an act of martyrdom die with a smile on their
face and go straight to heaven,' said FBI Agent Quinn, who interviewed Tazhayakov
in the days after the alleged visit to Tsarnaev's room.
"He also explained that during the same conversation, Dzhokhar said he knew how to build bombs," Quinn testified.
Tsarnaev was
captured in the days after the bombing and is awaiting trial in
November on terrorism charges. His older brother Tamerlan, also a
suspect in the bombing, was killed following a shoot-out with police.
FBI
agent Farbod Azad had testified on Thursday that Tazhayakov told him in
an interview after the bombing that he and Kadyrbayev and a third man,
Robel Phillipos of Cambridge, Massachusetts, had removed the backpack
and a laptop from Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's dorm room.
Tazhayakov's attorneys say he never touched the backpack or fireworks, and that it was Kadyrbayev who threw them out.
The
backpack contained fireworks with the gunpowder removed, a spiral
notebook, a jar of Vaseline and a homework assignment from an ethics
class in which Tsarnaev was enrolled, he said.
An FBI forensic examiner, David McCollum, testified Vaseline could be used to make an improvised explosive device.
Tazhayakov
could face up to 25 years in prison. Kadyrbayev faces the same charges.
Phillipos is accused of the lesser charge of lying to investigators.
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