Sunday Times 2
Girls and the marvels of the Mercedes ML 350
View(s):Terrified carjacking victim reveals the light-hearted jokes of Boston bombers
A 26-year-old Chinese entrepreneur has spoken about his life-threatening meeting with the Boston bombers after they carjacked his Mercedes last Thursday evening. The incident occurred at almost 11p.m. when the man, who has asked to only be identified by his American nickname Danny, had just pulled his car to the curb on Brighton Avenue, Boston.
While Danny was texting a man in dark clothes approached his car and knocked on the window. Before the driver could react the man had unlocked the door, climbed in and was brandishing a silver handgun, according to the Boston Globe.
The man, who would later be identified as Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, asked Danny if he had followed the news about Monday’s Boston Marathon bombings.
‘I did that,’ said the man. ‘And I just killed a policeman in Cambridge.’ Danny says he has been able to fill in important blanks between the murder of MIT police officer Sean Collier, just before 10:30 p.m. on April 18, and the Watertown shootout that ended just before 1 a.m. with the death of Tamerlan Tsarnaev and the serious wounding of his brother Dzhokhar, 19.
Danny has described a truly harrowing ordeal which included a bizarre mix of bursts of life-threatening violence with everyday conversation on mundane subjects such as girls, how much payments on his Mercedes ML 350 were, the iPhone5 and whether anyone still listens to CDs.
At one point Tamerlan told Danny not to llok at his face, to he said he would not remember his face. The bomb suspect replied: “‘t’s like white guys, they look at black guys and think all black guys look the same. And maybe you think all white guys look the same.’
In another moment during the crajacking, the suspects were disappointed that Danny did not have any CDs in his car. They flipped through the radio avoiding news stations and later put on a CD of chating after they had made a stop.
To begin with Danny was driving his car with Tamrlan in the passenger seat beside him, while Dzhokhar following behind in a sedan. Later the brother’s moved all the gear into Danny’s car and Tamrlan drove. At one stage during his ordeal, Danny says a friend called him on his phone and he was told by Tamerlan that he would be killed if he spoke to the person in Chinese.
‘Death is so close to me,’ said Danny recalling his thinking at the time. ‘I don’t want to die.’ ‘I have a lot of dreams that haven’t come true yet,’ said the student from central China, who attended a graduate school at Northeastern University before joining a tech start-up company.
Danny had come to the US in 2009 for a master’s degree and graduated in January 2012, before returning to China to await a work visa. He had returned two months ago, however he chose to told Tamerlan that he was still a student and had been in the U.S. barely a year.
He says the brothers had some difficulty understanding his English when he tried to tell them he was from China. ‘Oh, that’s why your English is not very good,’ said Tamerlan. ‘OK, you’re Chinese… I’m a Muslim.’ ‘Chinese are very friendly to Muslims!’ Danny said. ‘We are so friendly to Muslims.’
Danny also revealed that could hear the brothers openly discussing driving to New York, although he couldn’t make out if they were planning another attack or just looking to escape. Fortunately for Danny there was a problem because his car was almost out of gas and then a set of circumstances played out which afforded him an opportunity to escape his captors.
In search of petrol they stopped at a Shell Station, but younger brother Dzhokhar was forced to go inside the Shell Food Mart to pay for petrol. When older brother Tamerlan put his gun in the door pocket to fiddle with a navigation device, Danny seized his moment to escape.
He unbuckled his seat belt, opened the door, then slammed it behind, and sprinted off at an angle that would be a hard shot for any marksman. ‘F***!’ he heard Tamerlan say, but the man did not follow. Danny reached the safe haven of a Mobil station across the street and sought cover in a supply room, while he shouted at the clerk to call 911.
Authorities have said that Danny’s quick-thing escape allowed police to swiftly track down the Mercedes, abating a possible attack by the brothers on New York City and precipitating a wild shootout in Watertown that killed Tamerlan and left a severely injured Dzhokhar hiding in the neighborhood.
Dzhokhar was caught the following night, ending a harrowing week across Greater Boston and in particular for Danny.
Boston bomb suspect transferred to prison hospital
NEW YORK, April 26 (AFP) – The teenaged Boston bombing suspect has been moved to a prison medical facility, officials said Friday, as a Chinese immigrant carjacked by the Tsarnaev brothers offered gripping details of how he helped foil their escape.
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the 19-year-old wounded in a wild escape attempt, was sent to the Federal Medical Center Devens near Boston, US Marshals Service spokesman Drew Wade said in a brief statement. It gave no reason for the transfer or details on his condition.
The facility is about 40 miles (65 kilometers) northwest of the Boston-area hospital where Tsarnaev had been convalescing since he was found seriously wounded in a boat after a citywide manhunt, days after the twin blasts that killed three and wounded 264.
The Federal Bureau of Prisons describes Devens as a facility housing male offenders requiring “specialized or long-term medical or mental health care.”
Tsarnaev’s 26-year-old brother Tamerlan, the other suspect in the attack, died in a shootout with police last week as the pair tried to flee Boston in a hijacked car — reportedly with plans to drive to New York and set off more bombs in Times Square.
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has been charged with using a weapon of mass destruction and could face the death penalty if convicted in US federal court.
There have been mounting questions in the United States about whether the US authorities missed crucial signals, about Tamerlan in particular, that should have raised suspicions about the brothers before the bombings. US lawmakers said Friday the Tsarnaevs’ mother was being treated as a “person of interest” to determine whether she radicalized Tamerlan.
Zubeidat Tsarnaev has made impassioned critiques of US authorities in the wake of her eldest son’s death. “She is a person of interest that we’re looking at to see if she helped radicalize her son, or had contacts with other people or other terrorist groups,” congressman Dutch Ruppersberger, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, told reporters.
© Daily Mail, London
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