These “friends” that hid the evidence are the two in this picture above, Azamat Tazhayakov (second from left) and Dias Kadyrbayev (center) in Times Square. Tazhayakov and Kadyrbayev, who are from Kazakhstan, were previously arrested for visa violations on Saturday.
This is the third friend, Robel Phillipos, an American citizen:
Via NY Post:
Real funny.
Boston bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev didn’t have a care in the world as an army of feds and cops hunted for him after the marathon attack — texting “LOL” to a pal who warned him that his face was plastered all over the news.
“You better not text me,” Tsarnaev wrote Dias Kadyrbayev on April 18 after Kadyrbayev told him about seeing the photos on TV, according to an FBI affidavit.
Kadyrbayev and a second pal, Azamat Tazhayakov, were charged yesterday with helping Tsarnaev cover up his role in the April 15 attack. A third, Robel Phillipos, was charged with lying to the feds about the alleged conspiracy. All four men are 19.
Tsarnaev bragged a month before the attack that he knew “how to make a bomb,” according to the affidavit, signed by FBI Special Agent Scott P. Ciepik.
Yet the first time the men busted yesterday got an inkling that their friend was a terrorist was three days after the bombings, when Kadyrbayev, driving to the New Bedford, Mass., apartment he shares with Tazhayakov, got a call from a panicked Phillipos, saying a suspect in newly released surveillance footage looked familiar.
Kadyrbayev turned on the news when he got home — and saw his pal Tsarnaev. He texted Tsarnaev and got the response “LOL” — for laughing out loud.
“Come to my room and take whatever you want,” Tsarnaev also wrote.
But even then, Kadyrbayev though the texts were a joke.
The three college friends went to Tsarnaev’s UMass-Dartmouth dorm to see if the news was true, Phillipos claimed, according to the affidavit, but the bomber’s roommate told them that he had left hours earlier.
They hung around and watched a movie — then noticed a backpack that held spent fireworks, Kadyrbayev said.
“[He] knew when he saw the empty fireworks that Tsarnaev was involved in the marathon bombing,” the affidavit says. “[He] decided to remove the backpack from the room in order to help his friend Tsarnaev avoid trouble.”
He also grabbed the terrorist’s laptop, and a jar of Vaseline he believed was used to make the bombs.
Update:
Here are the full complaints filed against the three friends, as well as a picture of the recovered fireworks, which the friends hid.
Criminal complaint against Dias Kadyrbayev and Azamat Tazhayakov (PDF)
Criminal complaint against Robel Phillipos (PDF)
