One times Dzhokar Tsarnaev has been captured. The final suspect from Monday’s Boston Marathon bombings was found in a bloody mess, hiding in a boat in someone’s backyard. The capture included robots and thermal imaging cameras and helicopters.

This came at the end of one of America’s largest ever manhunts, which kicked off just a couple days ago when the police released photos of the suspects. The photos were taken from CCTV footage which allegedly show the two men cruising into the crowds at the Boston Marathon, placing their rucksacks on the ground and walking away. The bombs went off moments later. Click here for Wired’s detailed report on how ‘crowd-sourcing’ and a flood of information helped the FBI do their work in record time.

19-year-old Dzhokar Tsarnaev is the brother of the other suspect in the case, 26-year-old Tamerlan Tsarnaev (more on him later). But Dzhokar was alone when captured, as his brother had died earlier during a shootout with police – which came shortly after the police had released their images in a plea for the public’s assistance.

But that wasn’t the only shootout, as you will learn shortly.

The whole city looked like a ghost town, as the population was on ‘lockdown,’ giving the cops time to search and follow leads. They searched far and wide and, in the end, they found the remaining suspect very close to the original shootout (which claimed a cop’s life), hiding in a boat in someone’s backyard.

SKY News goes into further detail:

The second Boston bombing suspect has been captured after he was found hiding in a boat parked in a suburban backyard.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who was already wounded from an earlier shootout, exchanged gunfire with police for an hour while holed up in the boat in the neighbourhood of Watertown.

The dramatic stand-off ended with the 19-year-old being given first aid on the lawn next to the boat before he was taken away in an ambulance.

Dzhokhar remains in “serious condition” at Beth Israel Deaconess hospital, said Boston police commissioner Ed Davis.

Swat teams surrounded the boat after a tip-off from a resident who noticed blood on it, Mr Davis said.

The man lifted the cover of the boat, saw the teenager covered in blood and alerted police.

A police helicopter then used infra-red equipment to confirm there was a human inside the boat.

Infra-red equipment was not the only high-tech equipment used during these final moments. No, SKY News failed to mention the all-important robot!

Slate picks up the slack:

As more and more officers swarmed the scene, they sent in a robot to pull off the tarp, to get a better look at the suspect, and perhaps to see if he might still be armed with explosives. With the tarp off, police tried to talk Tsarnaev out of the boat, but he was “uncommunicative,” the commissioner said. After throwing several flashbangs in an effort to stun him, they took the suspect shortly before 8:45 p.m. U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz said that it was not necessary to give him his Miranda warning immediately upon arrest, as there is a “public safety exemption in cases of national security.”

Tsarnaev did not have any explosives on him at the time he was captured, as the commissioner revealed at the press conference Friday night, though he said that “handmade hand grenades” and “improvised explosive devices” were thrown at police during the shootout on Thursday.

The two accused have been described ethnic Chechen brothers who had lived in Dagestan, which neighbors Chechnya in southern Russia. They had been in the U.S. for about a decade and were believed to be living in Cambridge, Mass.

The Washington Post explains how the brothers got to live in the US:

The reached the United States in 2002 after their ethnic Chechen family fled the Caucasus. They had been living in the Central Asian republic of Kyrgyzstan and were prevented from resettling in war-racked Chechnya.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev was a southpaw heavyweight boxer who represented New England in the National Golden Gloves and talked about competing on behalf of the United States. His tangle-haired 19-year-old brother, Dzhokhar, was a skateboarder who listened to rap and seemed easygoing to other kids in his Cambridge, Mass., neighborhood.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev

In speaking about his boxing career in 2009, Tamerlan told a photographer that in the absence of an independent Chechnya he would rather compete for the United States than for Russia, a hint that past troubles were not forgotten. He appeared increasingly drawn to radical Islam. On a YouTube channel, he recently shared videos of lectures from a radical Islamic cleric; in one, voices can be heard singing in Arabic as bombs explode.

On that note, from CBC:

Militants from Chechnya and other restive provinces in Russia’s volatile North Caucasus have targeted Moscow and other areas with bombings and hostage-takings, but if it turns out that the suspects in the Boston bombings are linked to those insurgencies it would mark the first time the Russian conflict had spawned a major terror attack in the United States.

But this guy is not new to the authorities. In fact he was interviewed by the FBI for this very issue, back in 2011. We’ll let Reuters take this:

The FBI in 2011 interviewed the elder of the two brothers, acting at the request of an unidentified foreign government.

The interviews did not produce any “derogatory” information, and the matter was put “to bed.”

Spicy.

They went on to say that the interviews did not produce any “derogatory” information, and the matter was put “to bed.”

For them, maybe.

At a Friday night press conference, US President Barack Obama promised to seek answers on what had motivated the bombers and whether they had help.

Belfast Telegraph expands:

The capture of a second suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings “closed an important chapter in this tragedy,” US President Barack Obama has said.

But he acknowledged that many unanswered questions remain about the motivations of the two men accused of perpetrating the attacks that unnerved the nation.

“The families of those killed so senselessly deserve answers,” said Mr Obama, who branded the suspects “terrorists”.

The president spoke from the White House briefing room just over an hour after law enforcement officials apprehended 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.

Such a tragic and captivating story. Made all-the-more thoguht-provoking, now that the suspect’s mother has claimed the kids were framed.

Zubeidat K. Tsarnaeva, the mother of Boston bombing suspects Dzhokar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, told television networks that she believes her sons were set up.
“I am 100 percent sure that this is a setup,” she told Russia Today. “My two sons are really innocent and neither of them have ever talked about what they said now.” [more here]

Curveball.

We’ll keep you posted..

Click here for a whole bunch of photographs from last night’s capture.

Click here for epic photos of Boston looking like a ghost town.

Click here for detailed info on the Russian conflict that pushed these brothers to move to the US.

[Sources: huffpo, cnn, busins, sky, bbc, cbc, reuters, guardian, abc, dailymail, wired]