It was April 15, 2013, when during the Boston Marathon, two rudimentary bombs exploded, carried inside backpacks: three victims, including an 8-year-old boy. Among the injured, more than 260, 17 suffered limb amputations. The first bomb explodes a few hundred meters from the finish line, overwhelming the runners who were about to reach the finish line. Just enough time to realize you are in the middle of an emergency, and a second bomb explodes further down the route. According to the FBI, the two bombs were built using two pressure cookers filled with low-cost explosives, nails, bearings and pieces of metal. At the beginning of the investigations, both the Islamic hypothesis and that of internal terrorism remained standing. Through a special team of American law enforcement agencies, set up in record time, all the images from the street cameras are analyzed and dozens of witnesses are interviewed.
On April 18, the police identified the two suspects: Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, and his brother Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, of Chechen origin. Two years earlier the Russian secret services had reported Tamerlan Tsarnaev to the FBI, identifying him as a supporter of Islamic fundamentalism.
On the evening of April 18, policeman Sean Collier, 27, was killed near the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, perhaps by the Tsarnaev brothers, who in the meantime had fled in an SUV.
On April 19, police located the two men in Watertown, a small town near Boston. A chase begins followed by a shootout. Tamerlan Tsarnaev dies, while Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, injured, manages to hide inside a boat. The officers find him and take him to hospital.
On April 30, two friends of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev were accused of trying to destroy evidence by hiding the boy’s computer. Another is accused of perjury to the police.
On May 22 in Orlando, Florida, an FBI agent kills Ibragim Todashev, another friend of Dzhokhar. The officer stated that the shot was fired accidentally while he was questioning the suspect in his apartment, where the man attacked him. The FBI states that Todashev, before dying, admitted his involvement in the attack.
On January 30, 2014, prosecutors announced that they would seek the death penalty for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.
The trial opens on March 4, 2015. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev faces thirty charges, four of which are for murder. Prosecutors call him “a soldier in a holy war” who wanted to “kill innocent Americans to punish the United States.”
The closing arguments of the prosecution and defense were held on 6 April 2015.
On May 15, 2015, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was sentenced to death by lethal injection.
In July 2020, a federal court overturned the sentence against the young man – of Chechen origins – accepting the appeal against the death penalty that his lawyers had presented. A month later, then-President Donald Trump asked the Supreme Court to reinstate capital punishment.
In March 2022, the US Supreme Court reinstates the death penalty for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. The justices, by a 6-3 vote, agreed with the Biden administration’s arguments that the federal appeals court was wrong to reject the death sentence