FBI has the driver in custody.
"Man charged with obstructing bombing probe" by Milton J. Valencia | Globe staff May 30, 2014
A cab driver from Quincy who was close to the two suspected Boston Marathon bombers was arrested Friday on charges of lying to investigators and destroying evidence, allegedly obstructing the ongoing investigation of the 2013 attack that shocked the city and the nation.
Khairullozhon Matanov, a 23-year-old Kyrgyzstan national, allegedly contacted Tamerlan Tsarnaev 42 minutes after the April 15, 2013, bombings, and he bought him and his younger brother, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, dinner at a restaurant that night. Matanov visited Tamerlan, whom he knew from playing soccer and from places of worship, at the suspected bomber’s Cambridge home two days later.
Over several days after the bombings, he also called the brothers repeatedly.
Authorities alleged in a sweeping indictment unsealed Friday that Matanov realized the FBI would want to interview him about his relationship with the suspected bombers, but that he deleted files from his computer and tried to get rid of his cellphones. They also allege that he lied to investigators about his encounters with the brothers in the days after the bombings.
It didn't crash like the IRS computers with Lerner's e-mails?
He is not, however, accused of playing any role in the bombing itself.
“Matanov understood that federal investigators were investigating the Tsarnaevs as the suspected Boston Marathon bombers,” prosecutors said. “. . . Matanov then tried to discourage and impede that investigation.”
Matanov was charged with obstruction of justice by destruction, alteration, and falsification of records or documents in a federal investigation, which carries a punishment of up to 20 years in prison. He was also charged with three counts of making false statements to agents in a terrorism investigation, each of which carries a punishment of up to eight years in prison.
Matanov made a brief appearance in US District Court in Boston Friday. The native of Kyrgyzstan said he understood the charges and asked that a lawyer be appointed on his behalf.
Prosecutors asked that he be detained pending trial, and a hearing was scheduled for 11 a.m. Wednesday. Matanov was ordered held until then by the US Marshals Service.
Outside the courthouse, his lawyer, Edward Hayden, said Matanov understood the seriousness of the charges and was “very frightened.”
He should be. They murdered Todashev and made an example out of Tazhayakov.
Hayden argued that none of his allegedly false statements made to federal agents were material to the investigation.
“There’s a lot of unsubstantiated allegations, many [that] are not material,” Hayden said. “He had no intent to mislead the FBI, and, from what I can see, whatever he did didn’t impede the investigation.”
Prosecutors would not say why Matanov was arrested Friday, as the allegedly false statements were made a year ago. Hayden called it the “million-dollar question.”
A federal grand jury continues to meet in secret to investigate the bombings, according to a law enforcement official with knowledge of the investigation, who would not rule out the possibility of more arrests. The official requested anonymity because of not being authorized to speak publicly about the secret grand jury process.
The arrest early Friday by a SWAT team and a host of FBI agents startled the Quincy neighborhood where Matanov lives, a place where he often stood out as an outsider.
A neighbor, Leslie Aiello, 49, said she awoke around 5:30 a.m. to find Matanov’s brick apartment building on Common Street surrounded by agents. About 30 minutes later, Matanov was led out the front door in handcuffs. He was not struggling, she said.
People who knew Matanov described him as a hardworking immigrant cab driver who loved to play soccer and was a devoted Muslim. Ahmed Goutay, who organized a soccer team that included Matanov, said he was a reliable presence at Friday services at the Islamic Center of New England’s Quincy mosque and would trek with other worshipers to soccer games played afterward in Cohasset.
How did he like the World Cup™?
Goutay said he had been questioned by FBI agents about Matanov. He told Matanov about the interview, but “he said he had nothing to do with” the bombings, Goutay said.
Matanov arrived in the United States around May 2010 on a student visa. He attended computer technology at Quincy College for several months but ran into financial troubles, his lawyer said.
Hayden said Matanov then sought and was granted political asylum from the unrest in Kyrgyzstan. His mother and father, both severely ill, still live there, Hayden said. Matanov has two brothers there and two brothers in Russia.
That long forgotten nation?
Hayden said Matanov was born in Kyrgyzstan and worked in Russia for a year before returning to his homeland and then came to the United States. He has not traveled abroad since arriving here.
Russians connected to terrorists!
Court records related to Matanov’s arrest provided an eerie window into the lives of the Tsarnaev brothers in the days after the bombings. Tamerlan told Matanov at dinner on the night of the bombings that he did not believe Al Qaeda was involved because it would typically accept responsibility within hours of an attack.
I think Al-CIA-Duh is involved.
Three people were killed in the attack at the Marathon finish line and more than 260 were injured. The two brothers also allegedly shot MIT police Officer Sean Collier three days after the bombings, following release of their photos.
Tamerlan, 26, was killed during a violent confrontation with police in Watertown, when he tried to flee the area. Dzhokhar, now 20, was arrested after a manhunt. He faces multiple charges that carry the possibility of the death penalty and is slated to go to trial in November. He is being held without bail.
Authorities allege the brothers carried out the bombings as jihad, or holy war, against the United States.
Three of Dzhokhar’s friends from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth were arrested not long after the attack on accusations of lying to investigators.
Larry Marchese, a spokesman for the family of Martin Richard, the 8-year-old Dorchester boy who was killed in the blasts, welcomed the news of the latest arrest.
“While so many worked so hard to move forward from the painful events of that day, it is comforting to know the investigation continues and that the investigators won’t rest until they get to the bottom of what happened and how it came about,” Marchese said.
Every time they wave a dead kid at me I think GAZA!
Authorities said that before the attack, Matanov participated in a variety of activities with Tamerlan, “including discussing religious topics and hiking up a New Hampshire mountain in order to train like, and praise, the mujahideen,” or Muslim religion fighters, according to the indictment.
After the bombings, Matanov told an unidentified witness, who Hayden said was his roommate, that the bombings would have been justified if they were in the name of Islam.
Let me off here because this ride of propaganda has already been long enough.
According to the indictment, he later said the bombings might have been wrong, and expressed sympathy for the victims’ families.
On April 18, 2013, after the FBI released photos of the suspected bombers, Matanov accessed them on the FBI’s and CNN’s websites several times, and he called Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s cellphone, but did not connect with him, according to court records. He told a friend the next day that Tamerlan had been killed.
Throughout that Friday, April 19, 2013, while authorities searched for Dzhokhar, Matanov told witnesses about his relationship with the brothers, but he falsely said he had not seen them recently, according to the court records. He then allegedly tried to give cellphones to unidentified witnesses, saying they were illegal and the FBI could find them if agents searched his apartment because of his relationship to the brothers. The witnesses would not take the phones.
NSA would surely have them, though.
Matanov ultimately contacted Braintree police to say he knew the Tsarnaev brothers, but he denied seeing their photos. Then, he allegedly deleted 902 of 903 folders from his “videos” folder on his computer, and 377 of 402 documents from his documents folder, after police told him he should talk with the FBI.
So HE CAME FORWARD, did he?
Some of the videos contained violent content or calls to violence, authorities said, adding that the deletions of the files “obstructed the FBI’s investigation of the bombings and the suspected bombers and have caused the FBI to expend considerable additional resources during its investigation of the bombings and the suspected bombers.”
I hope this narrative reinforcement of the myth is worth it.
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"Suspect called ‘go-getter’ who showed no extremist views" by Peter Schworm and John R. Ellement | Globe staff May 31, 2014
QUINCY — At the mosque where he worshiped each Friday, Khairullozhon Matanov was seen as an unassuming, affable young man, a hard-working cab driver trying to make his way in a new country. He played in a weekly soccer league, wore blue jeans and T-shirts.
Nothing about him, several members of the mosque said, seemed at all extreme.
But at the brick apartment complex where the 23-year-old lived, some neighbors saw Matanov in a more mysterious, even menacing light. He never spoke to anyone, and walked with his head down, avoiding eye contact even when people said hello. Looking down into his basement apartment, neighbors saw that he slept on a mattress on the floor.
He must have thought Boston was New York.
“He kind of scared me,” said Leslie Aiello, 49.
Then that proves his involvement.
About 5:30 Friday morning, Aiello and other neighbors woke up to find their building surrounded by a SWAT team and some 30 FBI agents, who took Matanov into custody on charges of obstructing the investigation into the Boston Marathon bombings.
He must have been a real threat!
Neighbors said they had noticed an intermittent police presence outside the apartment over the past year, particularly around the anniversary of the bombings. Some suspected that Matanov was the target of the surveillance.
Yet Monday’s disclosure that Matanov had been friends with the bombing suspects and may have shared their radical beliefs left many who knew him stunned and deeply shaken.
May have?
“I had no clue he was this closely tied to them,” said neighbor Tyler Young, 27. “It’s shocking. I didn’t understand the gravity of the whole thing.”
To cabdrivers in Braintree, where Matanov had worked for more than two years, his friendship with the bombing suspects was no secret.
His boss at Braintree Checker Cab said Matanov revealed to colleagues that he knew the Tsarnaev brothers in the days after they had been identified as the bombing suspects and was “adamant they didn’t do it.”
“Not those guys — they got it wrong, or they are being framed,” the company owner recalled Matanov saying. “They would never have done that.”
And that is why this guy needed to be taken into custody.
The owner, who asked to be identified only by his first name, Nour, said Matanov made no secret of his friendship with the suspects. But with the shock of the bombings still raw, drivers asked few questions.
“When it just happened, nobody wanted to talk about it,’’ Nour said. “It was cut short. And nobody probed any further, so he didn’t say anything else.”
Matanov said he had met the Tsarnaevs while playing soccer, Nour said.
At the cabstand in Braintree, drivers who knew Matanov described him as a likeable, regular guy who showed no signs of extremist tendencies.
“That would be a surprise,” said Jerome Shea, a Checker Cab driver. “He’s a real nice guy, hard-working kid. He’s always been pleasant to me.”
Matanov, who is a native of Kyrgyzstan and had no family in the United States, came here on a student visa in 2010, his lawyer, Edward Hayden, said in court.
He studied information technology at Quincy College, but discontinued college at some point. Hayden said he believed it was because of financial problems.
Matanov then applied for asylum and was granted it because of turmoil in Kyrgyzstan.
Matanov comes from Suzak, a small town on Kyrgyzstan’s border with Uzbekistan in the volatile Fergana Valley region of the former Soviet Union. The area was riven with violence between ethnic Kyrgyz and ethnic Uzbeks that took hundreds of lives in 2010, the year Matanov came to the United States. The Fergana Valley has a large population of devout Muslims and has been a fertile recruiting ground for Islamic militants since the breakup of the Soviet Union.
I see the hallmarks of Al-CIA-Duh, don't you?
The Tsarnaev family emigrated from a different part of Kyrgyzstan in the early 2000s.
Matanov has four brothers, two in Kyrgyzstan, two in Russia, Hayden said. His mother is very ill with diabetes and his father had a stroke and is partially paralyzed, the lawyer said.
Matanov was a reliable presence at Friday services at the Islamic Center of New England’s Quincy mosque and played soccer with members in Cohasset, said Ahmed Goutay, who organized the team.
Goutay said FBI agents had questioned him about Matanov in the weeks after the bombings. When he told Matanov that he had been interviewed, Matanov said he was not involved. “He said he had nothing to do with it,’’ Goutay said.
As time passed and Matanov was not arrested, Goutay and others assumed the questioning was just a formality.
“If he is not in prison, he must be innocent” he said
Matanov never discussed his feelings about the bombings, terrorism, or Islamic fundamentalism, said Goutay, who was surprised by the arrest and the allegations.
Nour said he believed that Matanov also attended services in Cambridge and Sharon, when his job took him there at the time of services.
Administrators at the Islamic Society of Boston’s Cambridge mosque attempted Friday to determine if Matanov was the same Russian-sounding young man who occasionally sat with Tamerlan in the rear of the mosque during Friday services.
Ismail Fenni — acting imam of the mosque, which Tamerlan attended occasionally with his brother — said Tamerlan once introduced him to a friend who appeared to speak the same language and to be of similar descent.
Fenni said that the man attended the mosque several times after the Marathon bombing but has not shown up lately.
The mosque has no record of Matanov’s name, Fenni said. But he added that many who attend do not register their names.
Nour said that when Matanov began working for him about two years ago, the young man would avoid looking at attractive women as they walked by, but that more recently he changed his ways.
How much more proof do you need that this guy is a terrorist?
At least he isn't a pervert.
“He was a little bit more observant at the beginning; he would not look at a girl . . . walking by,’’ Nour recalled. “But lately, he’s a little bit more open to the average 23-year-old’s behavior.’’
Nour said he never observed Matanov listening to recorded sermons from imams, but instead listened to standard radio stations, especially while working as a cabdriver.
Oh, no. This is like the 9/11 hijackers hitting the clubs and casinos.
Nour said Matanov dressed like any other person in their 20s and would usually wear jeans, sneakers, and a shirt. “He wasn’t dressed in, like, a radical way, or in any odd way,’’ Nour said. “He was dressed the same way that the majority of people would dress.’’
Nour said that if Matanov is found not guilty of the charges he faces, he would readily hire him back.
“If the law proves he didn’t do it, then, yeah, I would definitely offer him a job,’’ Nour said. “He’s a go-getter. He would go and get it done.’’
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Being a good employee is not enough, even if you “never drink or play the lottery.’’
Related: Suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing case
Tsarnaev's Circle of College Friends
Matanov was not among them!
"FBI reveals surveillance of friend of Tsarnaevs; Says cab driver knew he was being tracked, complied with requests" by Milton J. Valencia | Globe Staff June 04, 2014
The FBI launched intensive surveillance of a friend of the suspected Boston Marathon bombers last year, tracking him by car through the area and at one point urging him to stay away from Boston on the Fourth of July, authorities said Wednesday.
How much did all this cost the taxpayers?
FBI agents were under orders to “make sure they stay with Mr. [Khairullozhon] Matanov, and don’t lose him,” FBI Special Agent Timothy McElroy told US Magistrate Judge Marianne B. Bowler in court. He said that Matanov knew about the surveillance and that “it was not covert in any manner.”
McElroy said the FBI also asked Matanov to stay away from Boston’s July 4 festivities because “for obvious reasons, the city was on edge.” Matanov was also asked by agents to avoid Boston on Patriots Day, or April 21 of this year, when the first Boston Marathon since the April 15, 2013, bombings was held, McElroy said.
So this guy was assumed to be terrorist right from the start even thought there was really nothing to indicate it.
What, the FBI try to set him up and he say no?
He said that the 23-year-old cab driver from Quincy, who by then had obtained a lawyer, complied with the requests.
Matanov had first contacted authorities four days after the bombings to say he knew the Tsarnaev brothers. He was arrested last week on charges of obstruction of justice, accused of allegedly destroying computer documents in an attempt to hide his relationship with the Tsarnaev brothers.
I guess you should never do that.
Prosecutors said he also lied about interactions he had with the brothers during the week of the bombings, including a dinner the very night of the attacks.
McElroy, who assisted in the arrest of Matanov last week, revealed the surveillance at a hearing Wednesday to determine whether Matanov should be held pending a trial on the charges.
In asking that he be held, prosecutors called Matanov a flight risk, saying he is not a US citizen, has no community support or assets, and he has extensive family and resources abroad.
Matanov shook his head in apparent disagreement.
Wasn't he granted asylum?
Dressed in orange prison garb, Matanov, a native of Kyrgyzstan, loudly pleaded not guilty in a thick accent. Prosecutors said a trial could last two to three weeks, with 20 to 30 witnesses. He faces up to 20 years in prison.
Matanov’s lawyer, Edward Hayden, said after the 90-minute hearing in US District Court in Boston that he could not credibly contest the request to keep Matanov detained, acknowledging his client would have no job and no place to stay, and had little money to post bail. Matanov was ordered held.
Where the government can work him over some more.
Hayden used the hearing and the cross-examination of McElroy, however, to provide his own interpretation of Matanov’s interactions with the FBI and his relationship with the Tsarnaev brothers. It was also disclosed that Matanov bought dinner for the brothers at the Man-O-Salwa Kabob & Grill in Somerville on the night of the bombings.
Hayden said Matanov contacted Braintree police April 19, the day after authorities released photos of the suspected Marathon bombers, and he identified them as Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev. He also provided their addresses and phone numbers.
“He gave [the FBI] access to information about the Tsarnaev brothers,” Hayden told reporters after Wednesday’s hearing. “Names, phone numbers, where they lived. Whether or not they met at the restaurant or whether he drove them there is not that important in the scheme of things, where he gave [the FBI] other truly valuable information.”
Matanov told Braintree police he had heard about the bombing suspects on the radio, that Tamerlan was dead, and added, “I can’t imagine that he did it.” He offered to provide information, and “anything I can do to help,” McElroy, the FBI agent, said under cross-examination.
He's doing it by having been arrested and incarcerated while this propaganda is shoveled!
By then, authorities had identified the brothers, after they had a violent confrontation with police in Watertown and Tamerlan was killed. Authorities were still searching for Dzhokhar, however.
Hayden said a Braintree police detective thought Matanov’s information was so material, he wanted to call the FBI right away. But the agency did not contact Matanov until the next day, the Saturday after the bombings, Hayden said, questioning whether the bureau believed him to be important.
???????
Prosecutors say Matanov gave FBI agents differing accounts of how he came to learn the Tsarnaev brothers were the alleged bombers. He said he learned that Friday, April 19, 2013. But prosecutors say he deleted computer information showing he realized they were the bombers the previous Thursday, after the FBI released its photos.
Hayden sought Wednesday to minimize Matanov’s interaction with authorities.
He did not contest that Matanov deleted information from his computer, but said it was immaterial to the investigation. He acknowledged that Matanov tried to give away cellphones to two witnesses, telling the witnesses they were illegal and the FBI could find them in a search of his home. But Hayden argued that the phones could be illegal for a variety of reasons.
“Even if it has nothing to do with terrorism?” he asked. McElroy agreed.
Hayden also downplayed allegations that Matanov denied being a friend of the brothers. He said his client clearly told authorities that he boxed with Tamerlan, played soccer with him, and went to his home in Cambridge and met his parents.
McElroy also testified that authorities believe Matanov wired money to people abroad 114 times from 2010 to 2013, totaling more than $71,000. Many times, he used aliases. The money went to 15 different recipients, and prosecutors argued that the money shipments showed Matanov’s extensive contacts in foreign countries, including Egypt, Turkey, Uzbekistan, Jordan, and Greece.
Now I am starting to wonder if this guy was in fact a U.S. AGENT or ASSET that has been DOUBLE-CROSSED like the Tsarnaevs!
Hayden argued that most of the money went to Matanov’s family members.
Like most immigrant remittances.
The defense attorney also sought to show that his client did not attempt to flee even when he first thought the FBI was tracking him.
At one point in May 2013, a month after the bombings, Matanov realized an agent had followed him to Boston University, and he started a conversation with the agent, McElroy testified.
That same month, Matanov started to drive “recklessly” on the highway, in a possible attempt to evade authorities, McElroy said. He said the FBI asked Matanov’s lawyer at the time to advise him to follow public safety precautions.
“The only thing he did wrong was drive recklessly,” Hayden said, “and once he was told to knock it off, he did.”
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Even the Boston Globe is seeing though the charade!
"Matanov charges look like a vindictive overreach | June 06, 2014
After every major
terrorist attack, there is a danger that society will, at least
briefly, lose sight of its better judgment. That’s part of the intention
of terrorism — to conjure up a state of confusion, rashness, and fear.
Over time, the disastrous Iraq war will probably be judged by historians
to have been an overreaction to the events of 9/11. So too will the use
of water-boarding and some other enhanced interrogation tactics be seen
as an hysterical lapse in judgment. Thankfully, the aftermath of last
year’s Boston Marathon bombings — a more contained event than 9/11 in
all respects — was far less freighted with excesses and misjudgments.
Nonetheless, the decision last week by federal authorities to prosecute 23-year-old taxi driver Khairullozhon Matanov with
crimes meriting up to 44 years in prison for allegedly lying and
obstructing the investigation feels like an act of vindictiveness that
many people will regret in coming years.
Or they are putting pressure on the kid.
As for Iraq, we have judged it to be far worse than that. The government and mouthpiece media lied us into a war, and have been lying before and since.
Matanov, a Muslim immigrant from Kyrgyzstan who was a friend of bombing
suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev, allegedly lied about having watched videos,
tried to cover up cellphone calls to Tamerlan and his brother Dzhokhar
Tsarnaev in the hours and days after the bombings, and wasn’t entirely
forthcoming about his contacts with the two brothers. These alleged
offenses occurred while he was apparently cooperating with police and
the FBI, and his lawyer insists his alleged misstatements didn’t impede
the investigation into the bombings.
Message received. Don't seek out authority, ever. Let the illegal immigrants know, too.
Former Boston police commissioner
Ed Davis’s sweeping claim that Matanov was responsible for the death of MIT police officer Sean Collier,
who was killed during the Tsarnaevs’ flight from justice, is misleading
in many respects: Davis apparently meant that if Matanov had recognized
the surveillance photos of the Tsarnaevs when they were first released
and immediately gone to authorities, he might have brought about a
speedier arrest, thus sparing Collier. Yet that allegation applies to
anyone who might have recognized the brothers. But Davis’s comment does
seem to reveal the state of mind of those who are bringing the charges
against Matanov: They think he was covering up his own jihadist
sympathies, which made him unwilling to help police.
The MISLEADING Ed Davis is going to be in charge of security where?
That may well be true, and his lies about, for example, not having
viewed any videos during a period when evidence indicates he was
frantically trying to erase videos from his computer, may have been
intended to hide extremist sympathies. But this is a good time to
remember that watching jihadist videos isn’t a crime. The US
Constitution rightly guarantees freedom of speech and thought, in the
belief that extreme politics of the type Matanov may have shared (or
dabbled in, or simply been curious about) are best addressed by an open
exchange of ideas. Coming from repressive Kyrgyzstan, Matanov may not
have understood that, in this country, watching extremist videos isn’t
remotely the same thing as committing a terrorist act.
If indeed he misled investigators about his own activities, Matanov
deserves some degree of punishment. But does that require four separate
charges with a cumulative possible sentence of up to 44 years? Throwing
the book at a scared 23-year-old immigrant because he lied about his
video-watching and hid details of his contacts with bombing suspects? If
the authorities believe Matanov was in any way involved in the
bombings, these charges might make sense. But they aren’t saying that —
not even by implication. Otherwise, this is just the kind of overly
aggressive prosecution that gives the wrong impression of America’s
commitment to freedom, civil liberties, and proportionate justice.
Oh, the problem is the imagery, illusion, and impression people are to get of AmeriKa Ju$tice. Gotcha, Globe.
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Also see: Judge says no bail for Tsarnaev friend
That is so he keeps his mouth shut.
Btw, did you know the bombers were heading to New York after they were done at the Marathon?
