Boston bombing Suspect Captured Alive, Suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev in serious condition

The Boston Marathon bombing suspect was captured alive but wounded Friday night after police found him holed up in a boat in a suburban backyard following a bloody rampage and a daylong manhunt, law enforcement sources said.
The arrest of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, ended five days of terror sowed by the double bombing at the marathon finish line, which killed three people, wounded 176 and left the city of Boston on edge.
“We got him,” Boston Mayor Tom Menino tweeted.
“CAPTURED!!! The hunt
is over. The search is done. The terror is over. And justice has won,” the Boston Police Department said on its Twitter account.
Cops cheered as the suspect was taken into custody in Watertown, Mass. just before 9 p.m., and residents flooded the streets, some chanting, “USA!”

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, a suspect in the Boston Marathon bombing, has been apprehended after a day-long manhunt in a Massachusetts neighborhood. NBC’s Brian Williams reports.

Police cornered Tsarnaev — a naturalized U.S. citizen of Chechen origin — around 7 p.m., less than an hour after police lifted a stay-indoors order for the city and its suburbs.
A resident went outside to smoke and noticed a tarp on the boat was flapping, a relative told NBC News. When he went to investigate, he saw what looked like a curled-up person and bloody clothes.
The man “freaked out,” ran into the house and called police, the relative said.
Thermal imaging from helicopters confirmed there was a person in the boat, officials said.
Over the course of two hours, several bursts of gunfire could be heard. The police threw flash-bang grenades designed to disorient and brought a negotiator to the scene as night fell.
Just before 9 p.m., Tsarnaev was taken into custody and police said he had been wounded. “He sustained significant blood loss,” a law enforcement official at the scene said.
As an ambulance took the suspect to the hospital, and police cars began leaving, people lining the streets applauded in joy and relief.
“We are so grateful to be here right now, so grateful to able to bring justice and closure to this case,” said Massachusetts State Police Col. Timothy Alben said at a briefing. “We’re exhausted folks but we have a victory here.”
Gov. Deval Patrick said the people of the state could “rest easy” but noted that there were many unanswered questions. Police have not released a motive for the bombing and they were still investigating whether Tsarnaev had help.
He will be questioned by a federal government team called the High Value Detainee Interrogation Group, consisting of officials of the FBI, CIA, and Defense Department, an Obama administration official said.
Tsarnaev’s apprehension capped a manhunt that had the city of Boston and its suburbs on total lockdown — following a rampage that included the slaying of a campus security officer, a carjacking and the death of Tsarnaev’s 26-year-old brother, Tamerlan, in a firefight with cops.
The overnight violence had triggered an extraordinary shutdown of transportation, schools and businesses in Boston and its surrounding suburbs, with police warning more than a million people to hunker down behind locked doors while SWAT teams fanned out.
The brothers’ bloody last stand began about five hours after the FBI released surveillance photos of two “extremely dangerous” men suspected of planting two bombs near the finish line of Monday’s Boston Marathon, killing three and wounding 176.

Suspect in ‘serious condition’

Police commissioner Ed Davis said that it was always the intention to take all suspects alive.

The hostage rescue team actually did work in trying to negotiate him out of that boat. They did try to talk him out. Although from what I understand he was not communicative.

Davis said the suspect “is in serious condition at the hospital” with injuries that he assumes were sustained the previous night.
He confirmed that police were alerted to the location of the suspects after the “vicious murder of a police officer” and then a robbery at a gas station and carjacking.
Davis is asked if it was a mistake to issue an all-clear – the final operation to ensare Tsarnaev came minutes later.

We certainly did not give an all clear. We had no information that the suspect was holed up … He managed to elude us by being slightly outside the area.

Davis says Tsarnaev did not have any explosives on him when he was caught. But he says that last night there was an exchange of over 200 rounds of gunfire, and hand grenades were thrown at the officers at the scene. “This is almost unheard of for an urban police department,” Davis says

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