FBI checking training angle in bombing

WASHINGTON – The chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee said Sunday that the FBI is investigating in the United States and overseas to determine whether the suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing received training that helped them carry out the attack.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, is charged with joining with his older brother, Tamerlan, who’s now dead, in setting off the shrapnel-packed pressure-cooker bombs.

U.S. officials investigating the bombings have told the Associated Press that so far there is no evidence of a wider plot, including training, direction or funding for the attacks.

The brothers are ethnic Chechens from Russia who came to the United States about a decade ago with their parents.

“I think given the level of sophistication of this device, the fact that the pressure cooker is a signature device that goes back to Pakistan, Afghanistan, leads me to believe – and the way they handled these devices and the tradecraft … that there was a trainer and the question is where is that trainer or trainers,” Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas, said on “Fox News Sunday.”

“Are they overseas in the Chechen region or are they in the United States?” McCaul said. “In my conversations with the FBI, that’s the big question. They’ve casted a wide net both overseas and in the United States to find out where this person is. But I think the experts all agree that there is someone who did train these two individuals.”

On ABC’s “This Week,” moderator George Stephanopoulos raised the question to the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee about FBI suspicions that the brothers had help in getting the bombs together.

“Absolutely, and not only that, but in the self-radicalization process, you still need outside affirmation,” responded Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich.

“We still have persons of interest that we’re working to find and identify and have conversations with,” he added.

At this point in the investigation, however, said Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., there was no evidence that the brothers “were part of a larger organization, that they were, in fact, part of some kind of terror cell or any kind of direction.”

McCaskill, who’s on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, told CBS’ “Face the Nation” that “it appears, at this point, based on the evidence, that it’s the two of them.”