FBI faulted in Boston attack

WASHINGTON – An inspectors general report released Thursday faulted the FBI for failing to conduct a “more thorough assessment” of suspected Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev, saying such an investigation might have turned up evidence about his growing embrace of Islamic militancy.

But the report’s unclassified summary stopped short of saying a closer examination of Tsarnaev would necessarily have prevented the April 15, 2013, attack, which killed three people and injured more than 260.

Acting on a 2011 tip from Russian intelligence, the FBI investigated Tsarnaev before last year’s bombing, but closed the inquiry after the bureau found no links to terrorism.

Tsarnaev was killed four days after the attack in a shootout with police in nearby Watertown, Mass. His younger brother and suspected accomplice, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, was arrested and faces a potential death sentence when he goes on trial this year.

The report criticized the FBI for not sharing its intelligence on Tsarnaev with law enforcement officials in Boston, saying that local police might have opened their own investigation.

After the bombing, the FBI was sharply criticized for not doing more to investigate Tsarnaev. The inspectors general report said that in March 2011 the FBI’s legal attache in Moscow received a memo from the Russian security agency FSB regarding Tsarnaev and his mother. It alleged that both were “adherents of radical Islam” and that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was preparing to travel to Russia to join “unspecified bandit underground groups” in the restive republics of Dagestan and Chechnya.

The Russian agency also advised that Tsarnaev was considering changing his name to “Tsarni.” The memo included incorrect birth dates for Tsarnaev and misspelled his last name.

The attache forwarded the memo to the Boston FBI field office, where an agent conducted database searches, reviewed references to Tsarnaev and his family, performed drive-bys of Tsarnaev’s home, visited his former college and interviewed Tsarnaev and his parents.

But the inspectors general report faulted the FBI for not doing more.

The report said the FBI should have alerted local police, tapped into more databases, visited the mosque where Tsarnaev often erupted in tirades about extremism, interviewed Tsarnaev’s wife and talked to his former girlfriend.

FBI Director James B. Comey, who took the helm after the bombings, said in response to the report that the bureau had taken broad steps to ensure that in the future “all threat information is proactively and uniformly shared with state and local partners.”