Secretary of State John Kerry broke with some of his peers Wednesday and asserted the elder suspect in the Boston Marathon bombing was radicalized in Chechnya then came back to America “to kill.”
Speaking in Brussels, Kerry made this comment in response to a reporter who said other countries are witnessing their own youth leaving to go to Syria–apparently to either be radicalized or to take part in radical behavior. He asked Kerry if the U.S. has that same problem.
“Well, of course we have the same problem,” Kerry responded, introducing Tamerlan Tsarnaev into the discussion. “We just had a young person who went to… Chechnya, who blew people up in Boston. So he didn’t stay where he went, but he learned something where he went and he came back with a willingness to kill people.”
Kerry’s assessment contradicts that of federal law enforcement officials who, according to Senate Intelligence Committee member Richard Burr (R-NC), made it clear they believed “the brothers had apparently been radicalized by material on the Internet rather than by contact with militant groups overseas.”
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