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Suspect in Boston Bombing Talked Jihad in Russia

KIZLYAR, Russia — It’s not every day that a well-dressed American shows up in this town, where shaggy cows meander over deeply rutted roads, so people remember Tamerlan Tsarnaev. Among the things that made the young visitor stand out, two acquaintances recalled on Thursday, was his avid interest in waging jihad.

“He already had jihad views when he came; I think because he was Chechen, he was rooting for his homeland,” Zaur M. Zakaryayev, 29, a member of a Salafi advocacy organization, the Union of the Just, said Thursday. “When he got here he was surprised at the conditions. I think he expected to find a full-fledged war, that one people was fighting with another.”

These new accounts out of Kizlyar, where Mr. Tsarnaev spent time with a cousin who is a prominent Salafi Islamist leader, have begun to flesh out a picture of what he did during his six months in Russia last year.

On Sunday agents from the Federal Security Service, the successor to the Soviet-era K.G.B., interrogated Mr. Tsarnaev’s cousin, who is in police custody, asking if he impressed the young man with “extremist” views, his lawyer said.

But the cousin, Magomed Kartashov, told them it was the other way around. In interviews, several young men here agreed, saying that Mr. Kartashov spent hours trying to stop Mr. Tsarnaev from “going to the forest,” or joining one of the militant cells scattered throughout the volatile region, locked in low-level guerrilla warfare with the police.

“Magomed explained to him at length that violent methods are not right,” Mr. Zakaryayev said.

Russian investigators have been eyeing the possibility that Mr. Tsarnaev may have engaged in discussions as early as 2011 over serving as a courier for underground groups in Russia, according to a Russian law enforcement official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. But it appears those discussions were curtailed, perhaps because his contacts were killed during his visit.

In 2011, based on an intercepted phone call between Zubeidat Tsarnaev and an unidentified person, Russia’s Federal Security Service cautioned the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. that he had “changed drastically” and that he was headed to Russia to connect with militants.

Mr. Tsarnaev’s friends in Kizlyar may be responsible for a crucial change in his thinking. When he left, he was no longer focused on the local grievances that fueled the fighting against the police — but instead broader issues in the Islamic world, including the effect of United States and Russian policy in the Middle East.

Rasim B. Ibadamov said that by last summer, Mr. Tsarnaev was taking steps that suggested he had let go of the idea of joining the underground — for instance, applying to renew his Russian passport. “What I can say is there was the impression that Tamerlan listened to Magomed and to some extent, he changed,” Mr. Ibadamov said. “His behavior changed. He started to read more, and to read different books. In general, as far as I understand, he changed his views.”

Mr. Tsarnaev’s body was interred Thursday in an undisclosed location, the police in Worcester, Mass., said in a statement. The announcement represented an end to a grim effort to find a place to bury the bombing suspect, who was shot by the police and run over by his brother, Dzhokhar, after the two tried to elude the authorities during a chase that began April 18.

A long list of cemeteries had refused to accept the body.

“A courageous and compassionate individual came forward to provide the assistance needed to properly bury the deceased,” read a statement on the Police Department’s Web site.

Mr. Tsarnaev’s relationship with Mr. Kartashov, which was first reported by Time magazine on Wednesday, may help explain his mentality as he returned to the United States. Kizlyar is one of the most dangerous spots in Dagestan’s insurgency, in which militants kill scores of policemen every year and counterterrorism raids can leave neighborhoods in ruins. Mr. Kartashov once served as a police inspector there, but left the force around 10 years ago and has since become a charismatic Salafi leader.

His group protests police counterterrorism tactics in the region, which are often brutal, and it burned American and French flags after the release of the anti-Islam YouTube film “Innocence of Muslims.” The authorities in Dagestan have viewed Mr. Kartashov’s activity with mounting suspicion. He was arrested two weeks ago, after the police stopped a wedding convoy that was flying black flags with Arabic phrases.

“To all our questions there was only one answer: ‘We only have two flags: the flag of the Russian Federation and the flag of the republic of Dagestan. Do not raise any other flag,’ ” Mr. Ibadamov said. Mr. Kartashov now faces a possible 10-year sentence for resisting the police.

Mr. Ibadamov said that Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s parents had first turned to Mr. Kartashov for counseling during earlier trips to Russia, and that when Mr. Tsarnaev came to Russia last year they wanted him to follow suit.

“I understand that they had a kind of Islamic vacuum,” he said. “They turned to Magomed as a knowledgeable person. Magomed was happy about this; he explained what Islam was, what his views were. And the father was complaining that Tamerlan was sort of a tough kid, a boxer.”

When Mr. Tsarnaev arrived in Kizlyar to consult with Mr. Kartashov, they all noticed: “His pants, his scarf, his glasses, everything in aggregate set him apart from the mass,” Mr. Ibadamov said. He was partial to the Internet sermons of the cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who called for jihad against the United States and was killed in a drone strike in 2011.

But after spending a week in Kizlyar in conference with his cousin, he seemed to have new goals. Mr. Zakaryayev said he ran into Mr. Tsarnaev repeatedly at a Salafi mosque in Makhachkala, Dagestan’s capital, and was increasingly sure he would not join an insurgent group. “He could have gone if he wanted,” he said. “It’s not hard to do it, because every day there is a special operation, and every day people are leaving.”

When Mr. Tsarnaev was linked to the Boston Marathon bombings, his associates in Kizlyar had various reactions. Mr. Zakaryayev recalled wondering whether he had slid back into his old reverence for Mr. Awlaki. “I thought, he had those views, maybe he did it,” he said. But Mr. Ibadamov is like an overwhelming number of young people in Dagestan, where trust in law enforcement is close to zero: he believes Mr. Tsarnaev was framed.

In another reaction that is nearly universal here, he also expressed frustration at the attention that has been given to the attack and its victims. “What happened in Boston — we don’t support that,” he said. “Three people died. But on that same day, 100 people were killed in bombing in Syria. We say, is the blood of Syrians so meaningless for world society, and is the blood of Americans so important?”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 6 of the New York edition with the headline: Marathon Bomb Suspect Talked Jihad in Russia. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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