Everybody by now knows the name Tamerlan Tsarnaev. He’s one of the suspects allegedly responsible for the Boston Marathon bombings. He was killed last night after a shootout with police. Pictures of the aftermath have surfaced on the Internet (Warning: NSFW), but now people want to know more about the suspect before all of this happened.
In an issue of The Comment, a Boston University College of Communications magazine, from 2010, Tsarnaev is the subject of a profile and short photo interview that looked at his aspirations to become a U.S. Olympic boxer and a naturalized citizen. It’s revealed that he trained in boxing at the Wai Kru Mixed Martial Arts Center. He was studying at the Bunker Hill Community College in Boston to become an engineer, but he was taking a year off to train.
Here’s some photos of Tsarnaev in and out of the ring:
Despite aspiring to compete for the U.S. in the Olympics, it seems that Tsarnaev didn’t have any American friends. He said just as much in the interview:
“I don’t have a single American friend. I don’t understand them.”
He said that he didn’t want to compete for Russia because his home region of Chechnya wasn’t independent. Some have suggested, including his uncle, that he was radicalized by the violent Muslim sects that have been waging a war of independence against Russia for the past few decades.
For a final fun fact, he said that he loves Borat, the 2006 mockumentary that chronicled a faux-Middle Eastern man’s trip to America. He does say, however, that some of the jokes were a bit much.
[h/t: Reddit]