Michael McCaul, chair of the House Homeland Security Committee, told CNN: "He was interviewed by the FBI in 2011 and let go. He travelled back to Russia and spent six months there."
Stating that the FBI had questions to answer, the Republican said: "Clearly something happened in that six-month timeframe. He radicalised at some point."
Tsarnaev’s application for US citizenship was reportedly rejected after US officials carried out a background check that showed he had been interviewed in 2011 by the FBI.
An official told the New York Times that the Department of Homeland Security halted – at least temporarily – the application after the FBI interview of Tamerlan Tsarnaev was discovered in a routine background check.
It had been previously reported that the application might have been held up because of a domestic abuse incident.
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Federal law enforcement officials said on Friday that the FBI interviewed Tamerlan Tsarnaev in January 2011 at the request of Russian authorities, who suspected that he had ties to Chechen terrorists.
Investigators were turning their attention to the time Tamerlan Tsarnaev spent in Dagestan in 2012. Kevin R. Brock, a former senior FBI and counterterrorism official, said: “It’s a key thread for investigators and the intelligence community to pull on.”
Tamerlan Tsarnaev, a 26-year-old ethnic Chechen and one of two brothers suspected of carrying out Monday’s twin bombings at the Boston Marathon, died early on Friday after a shoot-out with police.
His brother Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was captured by police in a Boston suburb on Friday and is in serious condition in a hospital. He remains unable to speak as he undergoes treatment for a gunshot wound to the throat in hospital, officials have said.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/10008638/Boston-bomber-FBI-dropped-the-ball-over-Tamerlan-Tsarnaev.html
