BOSTON MARATHON SUSPECTS

The following piece was published 20 April 2013, SBS World News Australia Radio.

By Ildi Amon
Melbourne

Thousands of police are involved in an intensive manhunt in the Boston area for the second suspect in last Monday's Marathon bombing.

The two suspects have been identified as brothers, 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, and 26-year-old Tamerlan.

While older brother, 26-year-old Tamerlan, was killed in a gunfight with police, Dzokhar remains at large.

Ildi Amon reports.

Originally from the southern Russian republic of Chechnya, they are reported to have been in the United States as permanent residents since about 2001.

Muslim separatist rebels have been active in recent years in Chechnya.

But so far no evidence has surfaced of any link between the Tsarnaev brothers and militants in their former homeland, or elsewhere.

An uncle of the two suspects Ruslan Tsarni, who lives in the U-S state of Maryland, told reporters they may have been envious of other migrants with better settlement experiences.

"What do you think provoked this? Being losers, hatred to those who were able to settle themselves. These are the only reasons I can imagine. Anything else, anything else to do with religion, with Islam, it's a fraud, it's a fake."

The Tsarnaev brothers lived in the Massachusetts town of Cambridge.

In 2011, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, was reported to have received a scholarship as a promising senior student at a local high school.

A former school-mate of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who wanted to remain anonymous, told CNN he was someone people looked up to.

"He was a fun kid, you know, he liked a lot of people, he had a lot of friends, diverse type of friends, you know, he was cheerful, he was never really mad at the world, he was mellow."

According to friends and relatives, the brothers showed few signs of radicalism in the United States.

And a high school friend of the missing suspect, Eric Mercado, told C-N-N he seemed to be a normal American teenager.

"It doesn't really make sense, we would see him in the hallways and we would say hi to a kid, that you know, just a normal kid and to think that he is capable of something like this is beyond belief."

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's older brother, Tamerlan, was a college student and an amateur boxer who reportedly once had hopes of competing in the Olympics.

And according to their father, who still lives in Dagestan, the Tsarnaev brothers were framed.

However, much is still unknown about the brothers suspected of the Boston Marathon bombings that killed at least three people and injured 176 others.