Workers replaced missing
bricks and patched up concrete just before opening the area to
pedestrian traffic Wednesday morning. It's another sign that Boston is
recovering from the dual bombings that killed three and wounded hundreds
more.
But the impact of the blasts is far from over.
On Wednesday, mourners will gather at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to honor campus Officer Sean Collier, who authorities say was fatally shot by the suspected bombers last week.
And as more details
slowly emerge from the bedridden suspect, U.S. officials arrived in
Dagestan to try to interview the parents of the suspected bombers.
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Hunting for clues abroad
A delegation from the
U.S. Embassy in Moscow arrived in Dagestan as part of the investigation
into the Boston Marathon bombings, an embassy official told CNN's Phil
Black on Wednesday.
The group will try to
interview the parents of suspects Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the
official said. The Russian government is cooperating with the trip and
with FBI in its investigation, the source added.
The Tsarnaev family hails
from the Russian republic of Chechnya and fled the brutal wars there in
the 1990s. The two brothers were born in Kyrgyzstan, and their parents
live in Dagestan.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said he suspects the older brother may have been influenced during his trip to Russia.
"We just had a young
person who went to Russia, Chechnya, who blew people up in Boston,"
Kerry said Wednesday during a trip to Belgium. "So he didn't (say) where
he went, but he learned something where he went, and he came back with a
willingness to kill people."
A senior State
Department official later clarified that Kerry "was simply expressing
broad concern about radicalism rather than indicating any new
information or conclusion about the individuals involved."
Meanwhile, Dzhokhar
Tsarnaev, the surviving suspect, has cited the U.S. wars in Afghanistan
and Iraq as motivating factors behind the attack, a U.S. government
official said Tuesday.
The younger brother remains hospitalized with an array of gunshot wounds, but has been upgraded from serious to fair condition.
He has been
communicating with investigators in a limited fashion from his hospital
bed and told them that neither he nor his brother Tamerlan had any
contact with terrorist groups overseas. But the official cautioned that
the interviews were preliminary and that Tsarnaev's account needs to be
checked out.
The 19-year-old also
told investigators the brothers were self-radicalized via the Internet.
Authorities are looking into whether the online English-language
magazine Inspire, put out by Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, was used
for instruction on how to make the bombs, but another source cautioned
that other outlets could have provided that information.
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Suspect shopped at fireworks store
More than two months
before the marathon bombings, Tamerlan Tsarnaev bought two reloadable
mortar-style fireworks from a New Hampshire store.
On February 6, he had
one question for a store assistant at Phantom Fireworks in Seabrook, New
Hampshire: "What's the biggest and loudest thing you have?"
After that, store Vice President William Weimer said, Tsarnaev shelled out $200 in cash for two "lock and load kits."
Weimer said such
behavior is very common at the store. He said the store notified the FBI
after discovering that the marathon bombing suspect had bought
explosives there.
Law enforcement
officials told CNN earlier Tuesday that the number of fireworks bought
at the store was not enough to set off explosions the size of those at
the Boston Marathon.
"My assumption is they
bought this, experimented with it and decided against it and moved on
and found another source," Weimer said.
Suspects' relatives "devastated" by bombings
In a statement issued
through their lawyers Tuesday, the suspects' sisters, Ailina and Bella
Tsarnaev, said they were saddened "to see so many innocent people hurt
after such a callous act."
"As a family, we are
absolutely devastated by the sense of loss and sorrow this has caused,"
they said. "We don't have any answers but we look forward to a thorough
investigation and hope to learn more."
And Tamerlan Tsarnaev's
widow, Katherine Russell, issued a statement through her attorney's
office saying she is "doing everything she can to assist with the
investigation" and said she and her family are shocked and devastated.
The suspects' mother, Zubeidat Tsarnaev, said she thinks her sons were framed.
Speaking from her home in Dagestan, the mother said she thinks her sons were targeted "just because they were Muslim."
When asked whether she thinks her younger son will get a fair trial, she replied, "Only Allah will know."