A Republican senator says the name of Tamerlan Tsarnaev — the suspect in the Boston Marathon bombing who died in a firefight with police — was misspelled on his 2011 trip to Russia.
Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said Tsarnaev’s correct name never went into “the system,” and this thwarted the FBI in discovering the six-month trip. Graham said on Fox News that he spoke to the assistant director of the FBI on Sunday night.
Graham’s spokesman, Kevin Bishop, confirmed the senator’s comments on Monday.
The trip is the subject of the investigation into last Monday’s deadly bombings.
Rep. Mike Rogers, chairman of the House intelligence committee, had said Sunday that Tsarnaev may have used an alias to travel to Russia. Rogers made the comments on NBC.
(AP)
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3 Responses
Oh sorry people are dead and maimed for life we misspelled his name. ARE YOU KIDDING ME?! This is called “intelligence?!”
Lame excuse.
I have a hard time believing that the FBI or other federal intelligence services have such simple methods of checking list of bad guys that spelling errors matter. There are at least 17 ways to spell Muhammahd. Furthermore, Tsarnaev’s name, in Chechen, may be written in a Cyrillic alphabet, and there are probably many transliterations into the Roman alphabet. Surely the FBI and other federal services have software that can search for appropriate variations of spelling. Or, maybe not.