For Boston Suspects, Was Chechnya’s Violent Past a Motive?
MOSCOW, April 19 (Nabi Abdullaev, RIA Novosti) – As investigators hunt for evidence about the Boston bombing suspects, some of their questions – like the American public’s – will focus on Russia’s restive North Caucasus, including the war-scarred republic of Chechnya, a region that has produced a number of violent militant groups, but none that has been linked to terror attacks against the West.
The jumble of press and police reports from Russia and the United States suggests that the two suspects, identified by US security officials as Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 19 and 26 years old, respectively, hailed from a family of ethnic Chechens who fled the first war in their home republic in the mid-1990s. Afterward, they apparently lived in other parts of the former Soviet Union, also possibly Turkey, and came to the Massachusetts area sometime around 10 years ago.
There is no evidence linking the suspects to any established terror network – in fact, some security analysts have already said such a link is unlikely – but in piecing together their personal motivation, the metastasizing violence plaguing the North Caucasus over the past two decades may be a piece of the puzzle.
http://en.rian.ru/analysis/20130419/180736299/For-Boston-Suspects-Was-Chechnyas-Violent-Past-a-Motive.html
