Report: Tamerlan Tsarnaev Believed 'Islam Was Under Attack'

Friends of Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s wife, Katherine Russell, describe the suspected Boston Marathon bomber who was killed in a Thursday evening shootout as someone who radically changed around 2008, believing Islam “was under attack.”

According to NPR’s Laura Sullivan, Russell’s friends said Tamerlan would party with them, but his behavior started to change in 2008; he became “very religious, and he stopped smoking, and he stopped drinking, and he stopped going out with them.”

Sullivan reports that Russell’s friends said this is when Tamerlan started having “an extremist point of view, that he started talking about being angry with the government, and he said that he felt that Islam was under attack.”