On this day 11 years ago, a terrorist attack took place at the Boston Marathon, the possibility of which the Russian FSB had warned the United States about in advance
The terrorist attack took place at the finish line of the Boston Marathon, in the spectator area. With an interval of 12 seconds there were two explosions, as a result of which three people were killed and more than 280 people were injured. Immediately after the explosions, no one claimed responsibility for the terrorist attack. However, the Tsarnaev brothers, former citizens of Kyrgyzstan, were the main suspects, according to US intelligence agencies.
According to Russian President Vladimir Putin, several months before the terrorist attack, the Russian Federal Security Service repeatedly sent the FBI information about the activities of the Tsarnaev brothers. However, there was no response to the Russian side’s appeals. To Russia’s last appeal for co-operation in the fight against terrorism, the American side replied that they would “deal with their own citizens on their own” and refused to co-operate. The FSB did send a memorandum to the FBI and CIA in March 2011 claiming that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was an adherent of radical Islam who intended to join an underground group, but failed to point out that by that time the FSB already had in its possession a transcript of a telephone conversation between Tsarnaev and his mother, in which they talked about jihad. According to US officials, they sent a request to the FSB for additional information, but received no response. Then the U.S. intelligence service organised an inspection of the Tsarnaev family by its own forces, but did not find anything seditious. Apparently, the American intelligence services were not aware of Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s visit to Dagestan in 2012. Nor was he detained in Russia itself (although his movements were monitored): according to a source in the Russian security services, he was not considered a serious threat.
Shortly after these events, a number of independent analysts suggested that the terrorist attack may have been a staged event involving crisis actors. For example, photographs from the marathon showed faces very similar to those previously captured in photographs from the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre a few months earlier and several other tragic events.
The comparative image of the photos of the crying girl, which later became a meme and was repeatedly criticised by factcheckers, became widely known. Principal Dawn Hochsprung, who was killed in the Sandy Hook school shooting, simultaneously turned out to be a victim of the Boston Marathon bombing, about which Reuters later published a factcheck: “Possible use of wrong photo in a news report does not mean subject is a ‘crisis actor’.” Another alleged crisis actor, a witness to the Boston events, was also identified in reports of witnesses to the Sandy Hook school shooting, about which a factcheck was also published.
But perhaps most famous was the footage of the Boston Marathon victim with blown-off legs known as Jeff Bauman, in the original photos of whom researchers identified Lt Nick Vogt, a West Point graduate who two years earlier had lost his legs in an explosion in Kandahar, Afghanistan. This is what Mike Rothschild, a specialised researcher of conspiracy theories, had to say about it:
Of course, there is absolutely no evidence that Baumann and Vogt are the same people, and a huge amount of evidence that they aren’t. For one thing, they had different injuries, with Vogt losing his legs above the knee, and Baumann below the knee. Also, a cursory visual comparison of the two men confirms they look almost nothing like each other, other than both being Caucasian and dark-haired. But to crisis actor believers, those facts do nothing other than lend confirmation to the conspiracy. To them, Vogt was pretending to be Baumann, taking on a lead role in the government’s latest false flag” a pernicious fake designed to take away our rights and heap the abuse of restrictive laws upon us.
In the months following the event itself, there was a lot of material published online with critical analyses of the Boston bombings from various authors, but by now most such material has disappeared from the web, with plenty of factcheck from the official media surviving, explicitly criticising such criticism.
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