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Phone Calls Discussing Jihad Prompted Russian Warning on Tsarnaev

The Russian warning to the United States government in 2011 about Tamerlan Tsarnaev, one of two brothers accused in the Boston Marathon bombing on April 15, was based on two intercepted telephone calls discussing jihad, both involving his mother, a law enforcement official said on Saturday.

The Russian authorities informed the F.B.I. in March 2011 that Mr. Tsarnaev, an ethnic Chechen who had lived in the United States for about a decade, had changed drastically, had adopted extremist views and planned to travel to Russia to meet with underground groups. The F.B.I. sent agents to interview Mr. Tsarnaev and his parents and found no evidence of any crime, but the Russians re-sent the same information to the C.I.A. in September 2011.

Despite repeated requests for additional information about what was behind the warning, Russian officials never explained the basis for their concern until after the Boston bombing, which killed three people and wounded more than 260. Only in recent days did the Russian authorities say that the intercepted phone calls had prompted their messages to the United States government, said the official, who would speak about the continuing investigation only on condition of anonymity.

The intercepted calls were first reported by The Associated Press on Saturday. Both calls involved Zubeidat Tsarnaeva, the mother of Tamerlan and his younger brother, Dzhokhar. The authorities believe that the brothers set off two homemade bombs at the marathon’s finish line. Tamerlan, 26, died after being shot by the police and run over with a vehicle driven by his fleeing brother; Dzhokhar, 19, was shot but is recovering in a prison hospital.

One call was between Tamerlan Tsarnaev and his mother; the other was between Ms. Tsarnaeva and another person in Russia who is under F.B.I. investigation in an unrelated matter. The calls mentioned jihad — a central concept in Islam that sometimes can mean holy war — but no specific attack plans, the official said.

The Russian information led the F.B.I. to conduct an assessment that involved the interviews, as well as a search of American counterterrorism databases and a look at Mr. Tsarnaev’s Internet activity. But the case was closed when nothing alarming was found, and it was not reopened when some officials learned in January 2012 that Mr. Tsarnaev planned to travel to Dagestan, in southern Russia, where he spent six months before returning to Boston.

Had the F.B.I. and C.I.A. known the details behind the warning, it is possible that a full investigation might have been ordered. “Would we have gone farther?” one law enforcement official said. “Maybe, maybe not.”

Russia fought two brutal wars against Chechen separatists in the 1990s, and Chechen militants have carried out acts of terrorism in Russia. But while part of the Chechen movement embraced Al Qaeda’s idea of a global jihad, Chechen militants have not generally been viewed as a significant threat to the United States.

In recent years, Dagestan, which borders Chechnya to the east, has increasingly become a center of Islamic insurgent activity in Russia. But there, too, the focus has been an internal struggle between orthodox Salafist Muslims, some of whom seek independence from Russia, and more moderate Sufi Muslims supported by the government.

The Russian warning was viewed by F.B.I. officials in 2011 mainly as an expression of concern that Tamerlan Tsarnaev or his mother, both of whom had become far more religious, might carry out an attack on Russian soil. But both of their names were added to the American TIDE database, a list of people suspected of some connection to terrorism that contained more than 500,000 names in 2011 and now has about 700,000 names.

David M. Herszenhorn contributed reporting from Moscow.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 20 of the New York edition with the headline: Phone Calls Discussing Jihad Prompted Russian Warning on Tsarnaev. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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