Opinion

Tsarnaev’s first kill

This week the world was stunned by the menacing image of a London jihadi brandishing a blood-soaked meat cleaver as he calmly told a cameraman he’d just murdered in the name of Islam.

It turns out that America may have suffered a similar act of jihad in a suburban Boston neighborhood — without recognizing it. New evidence suggests the man who planted the pressure-cooker bombs at the Boston Marathon warmed up for his attack with a triple murder two years ago.

That news comes out of Florida, where FBI agents interviewing a friend of the Boston bomber shot him dead when he lunged at them with a knife. The dead man is Ibragim Todashev, and authorities say he’d admitted he and Tamerlan Tsarnaev had killed three men in Waltham, Mass., back in 2011.

At the time, the killing of these three men was thought to be a drug deal gone bad. But other facts point to other explanations. Though the bodies were discovered on Sept. 12, the families of the three men cite the lack of cell phone traffic after 8 p.m. to conclude they were killed the night before — that is, on the 10th anniversary of 9/11. At least two of the men were Jewish.

One more thing: They all had their throats slit.

Maybe these men did deal marijuana. But the circumstances, including Tsarnaev’s involvement, suggest that three Americans, including two Jews, may have been butchered in the name of radical Islam by the same man who would later blow up innocents at the Marathon for the same cause.

Ties to Islamist radicalism shouldn’t be exaggerated or invented — but they shouldn’t be buried, either. For the Waltham murders lend a grim credibility to the claim made by the cleaver-wielding killer in London: “You will never be safe.”