The two men who allegedly carried out the Boston Marathon bombing were ‘failed’ by their parents, especially their ‘controlling’ mother who encouraged their move towards Islamic radicalization, relatives told MailOnline today.
Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaeva looked up to mother Zubeidat as an ‘angel’ but, according to one of their uncles, she was the one who allowed them to be introduced to hardline Islamic views.
Ruslan Tsarni claimed that Zubeidat allowed a firebrand cleric into their house to give one-on-one sermons to Tamerlan over the kitchen table during which he claimed he could talk to demons and perform exorcisms.
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Troubled family: This black and white photo shows Tamerlan as a baby, with his father Anzor (left), mother Zubeidat and uncle Muhamad Suleimanov
Family friends also told MailOnline that the boys’ father Anzor never stood up to his wife and revealed that she was the ‘boss’ of their house.
Until now Tamerlan has been blamed for leading his ‘sweet, innocent’ younger brother down the path to radicalism that allegedly ended with them killing three people and injuring 170 at the Boston Marathon last Monday.
MailOnline’s extensive interviews with Ruslan and the boys’ other uncle Alvi paint the clearest picture so far of life in the family home in Cambridge, Massachusetts that should have been the cradle for two intelligent, handsome young men.
Instead Tamerlan is dead at the age of 26 after being shot dead by police as he tried to avoid capture.
Dzhokhar, 19, is fighting for his life in hospital due to injuries sustained during their attempt to flee.
Innocence: The Tsarnaev siblings as children. Dzhokhar, center, stands in front of his older brother Tamerlan as they are accompanied by their sisters
The brothers, Tamerlan, right, and Dzhokhar, right, were allegedly led towards the path of radicalization by their mother, Zubeidat, who was the boss of their family
Boston bombings: Suspects' mother says they were set up
The boys’ story began in the mid 1980s when a young Kazakh soldier called Anzor Tsarnaeva, met his future wife Zubeidat whilst completing his two years of military service.
He was aged 19 or 20 at the time, so she would have been 17 or 18. Zubeidat was from Dagestan, which borders Kazakhstan to the West.
They fell in love, got married and had four children.
The oldest was Tamerlan, followed by daughters Bella, now 24, Alilina, now 22, and finally Dzhokhar.
Relatives told MailOnline that In 2002 Anzor, now 47, and Zubeidat, 45 came to the US on tourist visas with a young Dzhokhar and claimed asylum.
The rest of the family joined them a year later, having spent 12 months living with Ruslan at his home in Almaty, the capital of Kazakhstan, where they used to go to private school and were visited every week by the grandmother.
Ruslan remember Tamerlan being a ‘joyful guy with a lot of ambition’ during that time.
He said: ‘They grew up nice because their grandmother was close to them, our family was close to them.
‘Grandmother kept them so they were always under supervision.’
When they moved to Cambridge their new life was not much of an American dream.
With minimal language skills their parents had to take whatever work they could get so their mother began offering facials in their cramped home.
At one point there were at least seven people living in a humble semi-detached property.
Alvi did minimum wage shifts whilst Anzor started working two jobs including at a car mechanic.
Tamerlan tried to make a career out of being a boxer but failed and dropped out of Bunker Hill Community College.
Boss: Zubeydat Tsarnaev, mother of the terrorist suspect brothers Dzokhar and Tamerlan, is accused of letting a radical cleric preach to her boys in their family kitchen
Dzhokhar however seemed to excel at school and eventually won a place at the University of Massachusetts where he was studying Marine Biology.
According to Alvi he led a quiet life and never went anywhere other than his home on Norfolk St and his school.
But trouble was brewing.
Ruslan, who had moved to Maryland and attended Duke University before becoming a lawyer, said that he did everything he could to stop it.
He said: ‘I watched them so closely, for a reason - to get them out of their parenthood, out of their parents’.
Ruslan had always had always had Tamerlan’s ear and said that like the other children he ‘came to America for a bright future’.
He remembers seeing him in 2006 when he was 21 and had just graduated high school.
Rusland said: ‘He was asking me questions and I was happy to give him the answers. I told him the best way to start your way in a country, I'd start with the Army. Give (your country) something.
‘We've not been brought here, give to it.
‘I told him that you don't have good English so you can't make it to a good school, but later. He can go there, while you serve you improve your English and with English you improve your education and the Army will give you the path.
‘At the time he seriously considered it. And in 2009 when I said why are you doing nothing, join the Army, why don't you be useful, he laughed at me for killing our brother Muslims..’
That year turned out to be a turning point.
'I watched them closely': The terror suspect's uncle, Ruslan, said he tried to help the boys grow up right but was eventually unable to see them any longer
After that Ruslan could no longer act as a proxy parent as he always had done.
Instead, as he sees it, Zubeidat took charge.
Ruslan said: ‘The change of the older boy, one of the biggest causes is her.
‘First she started playing into this religious c*** they say is a devotion to Islam.
Ruslan dismissed Zubeidat, who was arrested last year for stealing $1,600 of lingerie from a department store, as a ‘bad character’.
Life took a bad turn for one of her daughters who, according to reports, was set up by Zubeidat in an arranged marriage.
It fell apart two years later after her husband supposedly beat her up. Her other daughter was also married but got divorced too. Both have one child that lives with the father’s family.
Ruslan said: ‘I never liked her, but not for personal reasons. These kids, I thought she's not doing enough. She's not doing them right, especially when they grew up.’
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According to Ruslan, Tamerlan’s radicalization was well underway by 2007 - right under the nose of his mother.
He told MailOnline that the man responsible was a cleric aged around 30 called Misha and that he was an Armenian who, unusually for such a largely Christian people, had converted to Islam.
As far as he knew Misha was based in a mosque that was a short drive from Cambridge and that he was new to Islam.
A leader from the 50,000 strong Armenian community in Boston however cast doubt on the claim.
The Rev Gregory Haroutunian said he be ‘stunned’ if anyone in the area would have had such hatred for America.
Ruslan said: ‘People who lack morals but have big ambition always want some attention to themselves or certain respect to themselves.
'All they do is just change a tyre. You wear a hijab and you start dropping every other word Insha’Allah and all of a sudden that makes you a godly person.
'She supported it (in the boys), some really bad person (started it).
‘She was not able to teach them anything. The introduction came from new Muslim convert of Armenian descent.
'He claimed to be an exorcist who is fighting with demons.’
According to Uncle Ruslan, Tamerlan, who was an accomplished boxer, began his radicalization by 2007 - right under his mother's nose
One instance stuck in Ruslan’s memory which he later discovered from a friend who was there.
It was in 2007 one evening around midnight as Anzor came home from work to find the cleric in his kitchen.
Ruslan said: ‘It was all the same talking, God, God, how he's talking to demons, how he's an exorcist, how he's healing people. Tamerlan was absolutely in his possession. All around people considered him just another prick.
‘Then my brother comes in from work, very late and Anzor is talking to his wife saying what is this person doing here so late?
‘Tell him to get the hell out. And she says: 'You'd better shut up, this person is teaching wise things to your son'. This is the mother. After that Tamerlan went over his place, he changed his views. It started from people like that.’
Arrested: Zubeidat Tsarnaev was arrested in June 2012 for allegedly stealing $1,600 worth of clothes from a Lord & Taylor
Ruslan says he offered to send Tamerlan to a school in Almaty and pay for it, but he declined. He gave him $3,000 to buy a car and drive to his home in Maryland just to watch over the house, but he did not do it.
He also tried talking to him and said: ‘You are the older of the nephews. If you turn out to be a good man everyone will look up to you. You need to set that example.’
Ruslan tried ‘anything but not to be with his parents' because his opinion of them was so low.
He said that he would get phone calls from Ailina’s college saying she was in detention, having already been told by Zubeidat that she was in the library. Similar instances happened with Tamerlan.
By 2009, Ruslan had had enough. He told Zubeidat and her family they were no longer welcome in his home. Only his brother would be allowed in were they to visit.
It was the last time he would speak to his nephew.
A family friend said that the split happened because Ruslan became frustrated when his attempts to change the direction of Tamerlan’s life fell on deaf ears.
As Muslims, the way they traditionally resolved such disputes was that men would talk to men and that words would be said to the wife and the children.
But as Zubeidat was in command in her house, such pleas fell on deaf ears when made to Anzor.
A family friend said: 'It drove a wedge between them. Ruslan couldn't help Tamerlan because Anzor told him to stay away from his wife and not tell her what to do.
'It was very upsetting for Ruslan. He loves Dzhokhar and Tamerlan so much and to not be able to do anything really upset him.
'Anzor is so in love with his wife that he will do anything that she says. He will go to the ends of the Earth to be with her.
'For Anzor, them being together is more important to him than anything else.’
Tamerlan was initially blamed for radicalizing his younger brother, Dzhokhar, pictured, but it seems the family dynamic is much more complicated than that
At some point Anzor appears to have moved back to Kazakhstan, or possibly Dagestan.
Some reports have suggested he and Zubeidat separated but relatives told MailOnline that they are still together.
The last time Ruslan spoke to Tamerlan was in August 2009. He did not even go to his wedding to Katherine Russell, with whom he has a three-year-old daughter, and found out about it a year or so later.
Reflecting on their last conversation, Ruslan said: 'I asked him why he wasn't at work, what happened with your college, why are you not in college.
‘He changed his life views and he's on the path of God...he was all the time in the path of Jihad.
‘My brother lost control of it (his family) a long time ago. The mother was very influential. She says they would share everything with her, she had a very strong influence over them. She was controlling them.
‘Tamerlan absolutely controlled Dzhokhar, he was under his influence. This is how in our tradition, the older one has to control but take care of the younger ones.
‘The taking care didn't happen and he wasted his brother's life and he made him involved in this massacre.
‘Me as an uncle I hold responsible for what turned out with these kids, the parents. Had Tamerlan been closer to me, had I heard any of his talking I would have cut it and been harsh with him.’
With no uncle to watch over him, Tamerlan appears to have become even more radical and, on a personal level, more angry with the world.
In 2009 he was arrested after slapping his girlfriend and leaving her crying ‘hysterically’, according to the arrest report, because she suspected he was cheating on her.
Tamerlan Tsarnaev, (left), was arrested in 2009 for slapping his girlfriend and leaving he crying 'hysterically'
A year ago he and Dzhokhar began attending a local mosque, the the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Centre, but were not regulars.
About three months ago Tamerlan was thrown out after he shouted at the imam during a Friday prayer service because he held up a picture of Martin Luther King Jr and said he was a good man who they should emulate.
Tamerlan called him a Kaffir, or non-believer, and said: ‘You cannot mention this guy because he’s not a Muslim!’
The world would have to wait until last Monday to find out just how warped his view of the world had become.
In the aftermath, it now falls to the FBI and his family to try and work out what went wrong.
Speaking to MailOnline, Alvi said that it was all ‘too much for my heart’ and that he could not believe that his boys were responsible.
Looking back, Alvi said that Ruslan gave Tamerlan and Dzhokhar a great start in life and ‘put those children in a good place’.
But he also agreed that when it came to family affairs, they treated their mother 'like an angel' - and that what she said was the law.
He said: 'They would do anything for their mother. They are not going to listen to their father but they are going to listen to their mother.
'They are very close to their mother....she is the family boss. She is the boss in the family.
‘Usually in Muslim people the boss is the man, but in their family, she is the boss'.
Alvi also revealed that the hate which swept up his two nephews is now reached his doorstep too.
Since the bombings he has received a string of voicemail messages which have left him deeply disturbed.
He has deleted most of them, but the one he has saved is a man’s voice which says: ‘Leave our country you Cechnic Chechen Muslim motherf******s’.
For her part Zubeidat is unrepentant about encouraging Tamerlan to become more religious and even brags about how it has ‘changed’ her for the better.
She told the Wall St Journal that at Tamerlan’s request she wore Islamic clothes around the house, even though Anzor did not want her to.
Zubeidat said: ‘I told Tamerlan that we are Muslim, and we are not practicing our religion, and how can we call ourselves Muslims?
‘And that's how Tamerlan started reading about Islam, and he started praying, and he got more and more and more into his religion.
‘I started reading and started learning, I started reading with my Tamerlan’.
In fact their bond was so close, that it was her that Tamerlan chose to phone in the early hour of Friday morning in the middle of the gun battle with police that would claim his life.
With a suicide vest round his neck and explosions going off around him, he dialled her number and said: ‘The police, they have started shooting at us, they are chasing us’.
Then, finally, before hanging up he said: 'Mama, I love you.'