By Dylan Stableford
Suspected Boston marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev was tormented by voices in his head, according to the Boston Globe, which published the results of a five-month investigation into the attack on Sunday.
“He believed in majestic mind control, which is a way of breaking down a person and creating an alternative personality with which they must coexist,” Donald Larking, a 67-year-old who attended a Boston mosque with Tamerlan, told the Globe. “You can give a signal, a phrase or a gesture, and bring out the alternate personality and make them do things. Tamerlan thought someone might have done that to him.”
The 26-year-old, who was killed in a shootout with police, carried out the twin bombings with his 19-year-old brother, Dzhokhar, who was later captured and charged with an act of terror.
According to the 18,000-word report, Tsarnaev brothers were coequals in planning the twin bombings that killed four and wounded more than 260 others. And despite suspicions that Tamerlan made contact with Islamist radicals during a 2012 visit to Kyrgyzstan, the paper concludes the brothers’ violence was “more likely rooted in the turbulent collapse of their family and their escalating personal and collective failures.”
Other notable parts of the paper’s investigation:
• A family friend said Tamerlan was “idolized” by the rest of the Tsarnaev clan. “Anything he said was right,” the friend said. “He was perfect.” When his mother, Zubeidat, told the friend that Tamerlan had said he “felt like there were two people living inside of him,” she refused the friend’s advice to seek treatment for her son. “No, he’s fine,” Zubeidat said, according to the friend. “She couldn’t accept the tiniest criticism of him.”
• “Tamerlan had some form of schizophrenia,” another family friend speculated. “That, combined with smoking marijuana and head trauma from boxing had all made him ill.”