BEYOND BELIEF: Suspects’ parents, Zubeidat Tsarnaeva (left) and Anzor Tsarnaev, say their sons were “set up.”
‘I WISH THEY NEVER EXISTED!’ Outside his Maryland home yesterday, a disgusted Ruslan Tsarni claims it wasn’t religious fanaticism that motivated his bomb-suspect nephews. (
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The angry uncle of the alleged Boston bombers ripped his nephews yesterday as a couple of “losers.”
“I wish they never existed!’’ said a furious Ruslan Tsarni, 42, of Montgomery Village, Md.
Asked what possible motive his nephews, Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, could have had for Monday’s deadly double bombing at the Boston Marathon, Tsarni replied, “Being losers. Failure to settle themselves. These are the only reasons I can imagine of.
“Anything else having to do with religion, about Islam, it’s a fraud, it’s a fake!” he said.
Another uncle, Alvi Tsarnaev, 43, said an emotional Tamerlan, 26, called him out of the blue at around 7 p.m. Thursday — hours before he was killed in a showdown with cops — and asked for forgiveness.
“He said, ‘I love you,’ and ‘Forgive me,’ ” said Alvi Tsarnaev, who also lives in Maryland.
The uncle said he hadn’t talked to his nephew in about two years and that Tamerlan greeted him with “Salam Aleikum” — Arabic for “Peace on You.’’
The brothers’ parents, who lived with the boys in Boston up until a few months ago, both claimed that their sons were “set up” — and his dad had a warning for authorities.
“If they killed him, then all hell would break loose,” Anzor Tsarnaev, 47, told ABC News.
“If they kill [Dzhokhar], I will know that it is an inside job, a hit job. The police are to blame.”
Tsarnaev said he called his sons after the bombing — to make sure that they were OK.
“We talked about the bombing. I was worried about them,” said Tsarnaev, a car mechanic living in the Russian city of Makhachkala, where he moved for brain-cancer treatment.
“Everything is good, Daddy. Everything is very good,” the father said they told him.
Their mother, Zubeidat Tsarnaeva, 45, insisted the boys “are really innocent.”
“I am really sure, like 100 percent sure that this is a set-up,’’ she told RTV, a Russian TV network, from the home she shares with her husband. “I know that neither of them have never, never have talked about whatever they are saying about now . . . Nobody talked about terrorism.
“My oldest son, Tamerlan, got involved [in] religion, of religious politics five years ago,’’ said the mom — who was busted in June for shoplifting $1,624 in women’s clothes from a Lord & Taylor in Natick, Mass.
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“He started following his own religious tactics, and he never told me he would be on the side of jihad,” she said.
The mom, who wears traditional Muslim head-covering, bitterly complained of the FBI tailing Tamerlan for the past several years, though federal sources said that was untrue.
“They knew what my son was doing and what sites on the Internet he was going to. They used to come to talk to me,’’ she said.
The parents also have two daughters in New Jersey.
The women, ages 22 and 24, were evicted from their apartment in Fairview, NJ, two months ago after noise complaints and have since moved to West New York, NJ, where the FBI removed a computer and other evidence yesterday.
The sisters insisted they haven’t been in touch with their brothers for months.
“I would never have expected this,’’ said one sister, who was identified as Amina, to the Newark Star-Ledger. Of Tamerlan, she added sadly, “He was a great person. I thought I knew him. The cops took his life away just the same way he took others’ lives away, if that’s even true.
“At the end of the day, no one knows the truth.’’