Officials at the Cambridge, Massachusetts, mosque where the accused Boston Marathon bombers sometimes worshipped said on Tuesday that they had offered to send a mediator to help law enforcement negotiate with Dzhokhar Tsarnaev when police had him cornered on Friday night.

They said they had not been asked to hold a burial service for his older brother, Tamerlan, who was killed in a shootout with police, and were not sure how they would respond if asked.

“That’s a decision that we’d leave up to a scholar,” Yusufi Vali, a spokesman for the Islamic Society of Boston, told reporters outside the Cambridge mosque. “This one is complex because the things that this guy did were just absolutely disgraceful. That’s something that we’d leave up to a religious scholar.”

Three mosque members who remembered Tamerlan, who worshipped irregularly at the mosque and twice disrupted services, were questioned by law enforcement after telling officials they remembered the suspect, Vali said.

“When the standoff was happening between the younger suspect, we even called law enforcement officials and said that if it is useful we are happy to send in a mediator,” Vali said. “They didn’t get back to us.”

(Reuters)