Lawyer: Boston Bomb Suspect’s Wife Assisting Probe

PROVIDENCE, R.I./BOSTON (Reuters) —

The wife of the dead Boston Marathon bombing suspect is assisting authorities and she is in absolute shock that her husband and brother-in-law were accused of the deadly blasts, her lawyer said on Tuesday.

A lawyer for Katherine Russell, 24, said she was busy caring for their two-and-a-half-year-old daughter and working as a home healthcare aide in the time leading up the blasts that killed three people and wounded more than 200.

“She is doing everything she can to assist with the investigation,” the lawyer, Amato DeLuca, said outside his Providence, Rhode Island office. “The reports of involvement by her husband and brother-in-law came as an absolute shock to them all.”

Russell, an American-born convert to Islam, is not a suspect. Officials have identified only the ethnic Chechen brothers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev as suspects.

Dzhokhar told investigators in his hospital room he and his brother acted alone, without any help, according to reports by NBC, CNN and The New York Times. He said his older brother was the driving force behind the bombings, the reports said. Reuters could not independently confirm the information.

DeLuca, the widow’s lawyer, declined to say what law enforcement agencies Russell had spoken with or what they have asked her. “It is pretty evident that she didn’t know anything,” DeLuca said.

“She cries a lot,” DeLuca said. “She can’t go anywhere. She can’t work.”

A total of 264 people were injured in the blasts, the Boston Public Health Commission said on Tuesday. Hospitals reported 10 people lost limbs from the bombs packed with nails and ball bearings and 48 patients remained hospitalized as of Monday, two of them in critical condition.

The Tsarnaev brothers emigrated to the United States a decade ago from Dagestan, a predominantly Muslim region in Russia’s Caucasus.

To Read The Full Story

Are you already a subscriber?
Click to log in!