Witness tied to Boston bombing suspect killed by FBI
Twenty-seven-year-old Ibragim Todashev was shot and killed early Wednesday morning while being interrogated by police and intelligence officials in an Orlando, Florida, apartment. Todashev, a friend of Boston Marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev and, like Tsarnaev, an ethnic Chechen, was reportedly being questioned by a Federal Bureau of Investigation agent from the FBI’s Boston field office, along with Massachusetts state troopers and counterterrorism officials. The FBI claims that Todashev had implicated both himself and Tsarnaev in the grisly murder of three men in Waltham, Massachusetts, a Boston suburb, on September 11, 2011. They said he then suddenly pulled a knife and tried to attack the FBI agent questioning him. The attack, according to the FBI, prompted the lethal shooting.
Xymphora: 'Solving' crimes, post 9/11 - [Gawker: ironic_username:] So the FBI shows up to perform a prolonged interrogation of this guy, ends up shooting and killing him, and then lets everyone know that it's okay because he was part of a triple homicide in 2011. It's pretty convenient that they don't even need to have any sort of trial or anything at this point, because both of the suspects are dead. If all law enforcement has to do to convict people of crimes is anonymously leak incriminating details to a compliant media without fear of rebuttal or reprisal, then do we really need to keep offering suspects trials by jury? - After the FBI killed the guy they were interrogating, they immediately had to work backwards to solve the previously unsolvable crime, with the bonus that everybody will now forget that they eliminated a witness under very suspicious circumstances. Presumably we are to believe that the dead guy confessed, implicated the two brothers, and then for some bizarre reason decided to take on the FBI armed with a knife he somehow procured. Added: they are backing off on the knife story. Even Josh Marshall is finding this story hard to digest.