Police go door-to-door in search for Boston bomber

Watch live: Two suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing - identified as brothers from Chechnya - killed an MIT police officer, injured a transit officer in a firefight and threw explosive devices at police during their getaway attempt in a long night of violence that left one of them dead and another still at large Friday, authorities said.

A law enforcement intelligence bulletin obtained by the AP identified the surviving bomb suspect as Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev, 19, of Cambridge, Massachusetts. The suspect who was killed was identified by police as his brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26. Their uncle pleads with Dzhokhar to turn himself in.  

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Police say officers are going door-to-door, but the Boston Marathon suspect is still on the loose. Col. Timothy Alben of the Massachusetts State Police said Friday that officers would go street to street as the manhunt for the suspect in Monday's deadly bombing continues. 

"We believe this to be a terrorist," said Boston Police Commissioner Ed David. "We believe this to be a man who's come here to kill people. We need to get him in custody."

Authorities urged residents in Watertown, Newton, Arlington, Waltham, Belmont, Cambridge and the Allston-Brighton neighborhoods of Boston to stay indoors. At least a quarter of a million people live in those suburbs. All mass transit was shut down, and businesses were asked not to open Friday.

The uncle of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects urged his nephew to turn himself in Friday, saying he had brought shame to the family and the entire Chechen ethnicity.

"Yes, we're ashamed. They're the children of my brother," Ruslan Tsarni told reporters outside his home in Maryland.

FBI agents in Watertown (Photo: AFP)

The suspects were identified by law enforcement officials and family members as Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, brothers from the violence-wracked Russian region of Dagestan.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev, a 26-year-old who was seen in surveillance footage released by the FBI on Thursday in a black baseball cap, was killed overnight in a police shootout, officials said.

His brother, a 19-year-old college student, escaped. He was seen wearing a white baseball cap in the images from Monday's deadly bombing near the marathon finish line.

Forces going door to door in Watertown (Photo: AFP)

"Dzhokhar, if you are alive, turn yourself in and ask for forgiveness," Tsarni said.

Tsarni called his nephews "losers" and said his family had not seen them since December 2005. They lived near Boston and had been in the US for about a decade.

He said his nephews had struggled to settle themselves in the US and ended up "thereby just hating everyone."

Asked what he thought provoked the bombings, Tsarni said: "Being losers, hatred to those who were able to settle themselves. These are the only reasons I can imagine of. Anything else, anything else to do with religion, with Islam, it's a fraud, it's a fake."

Tsarni, who described himself as Muslim, said his brother left the US, and he had not talked to him since 2009. He said they had a personal falling-out but did not elaborate.

Russia's North Caucasus region has been plagued by an Islamic insurgency stemming from separatist wars in Chechnya.

The missing Tsarnaev (Photo: AP)

Boston bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev posted links to Islamic websites and others calling for Chechen independence on what appears to be his page on a Russian language social networking site.

Abusive comments in Russian and English were flooding onto Tsarnaev's page on VK, a Russian-language social media site, on Friday after he was identified as a suspect in the bombing of the Boston marathon.

On the site, the younger Tsarnaev identifies himself as a 2011 graduate of Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, a public school in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

It says he went to primary school in Makhachkala, capital of Dagestan, a province in Russia that borders Chechnya, and lists his languages as English, Russian and Chechen.

His "World view" is listed as "Islam" and his "Personal priority" is "career and money".

He has posted links to videos of fighters in the Syrian civil war and to Islamic web pages with titles like "Salamworld, my religion is Islam" and "There is no God but Allah, let that ring out in our hearts".

He also has links to pages calling for independence for Chechnya, a region of Russia that lost its bid for secession after two wars in the 1990s.

The page also reveals a sense of humour, around his identity as a member of a minority from southern Russia's restive Caucasus, which includes Chechnya, Dagestan, Ingushetia and other predominately Muslim regions that have seen two decades of unrest since the fall of the Soviet Union.

A video labelled "tormenting my brother" shows a man resembling his dead brother Tamerlan laughing and imitating the accents of different Caucasian ethnic groups.

He has posted his own joke: "A car goes by with a Chechen, a Dagestani and an Ingush inside. Question: who is driving?"

The answer: the police.

Elsewhere on the Internet, a photo essay entitled "Will box for passport" shows the older brother Tamerlan Tsarnaev practicing boxing at a gym. The captions identify him as a Chechen heavyweight boxer, in the United States for five years.

"I don't have a single American friend," one caption quotes him as saying. "I don't understand them."

Waterdown lockdown

The Boston-area shutdown came hours after the killing of the older brother, known as the man in the black hat from marathon surveillance footage.

All modes of public transportation were shut down, including buses, subways, trolleys, commuter rail and boats, said Joe Pesaturo, spokesman for the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority.

The suspects' clashes with police began only a few hours after the FBI released photos and videos of the two young men, who were seen carrying backpacks as they mingled among marathon revelers. The bombings on Monday killed three people and wounded more than 180 others, and authorities revealed the images to enlist the public's help finding the suspects.

Police launched a massive manhunt for Tsarnaev, 19, after killing his older brother Tamerlan Tsarnaev in a shootout overnight.

Suspect who is still at large

Authorities said surveillance tape recorded late Thursday showed the suspect known for the white hat during a robbery of a convenience store in Cambridge, near the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where a university police officer was killed while responding to a report of a disturbance, said State Police Col Timothy Alben. The officer died of multiple gunshot wounds.

From there, authorities say, the two men carjacked a man in a Mercedes-Benz, keeping him with them in the car for half an hour before releasing him at a gas station in Cambridge. The man was not injured.

The search for the vehicle led to a chase that ended in Watertown, where authorities said the suspects threw explosive devices from the car and exchanged gunfire with police. A transit police officer was seriously injured during the chase, authorities said.

In Watertown, witnesses reported hearing multiple gunshots and explosions at about 1 am Friday. Dozens of police officers and FBI agents were in the neighborhood and a helicopter circled overhead.

Suspect at at a 7-Eleven store before car-jacking (Photo: AP)

Watertown resident Christine Yajko said she was awakened at about 1:30 am by a loud noise, began to walk to her kitchen and heard gunfire.

"I heard the explosion, so I stepped back from that area, then I went back out and heard a second one," she said. "It was very loud. It shook the house a little."

She said a police officer later knocked on her door and told her there was an undetonated improvised explosive device in the street and warned her to stay away from the windows.

"It was on the street, right near our kitchen window," she said.

Yajko said she never saw the suspect who was on the loose and didn't realize the violence was related to the marathon bombings until she turned on the TV and began watching what was happening outside her side door.

Both suspects at Boston Marathon, before blasts

State police spokesman David Proccopio said, "The incident in Watertown did involve what we believe to be explosive devices possibly, potentially, being used against the police officers."

Boston cab driver Imran Saif said he was standing on a street corner at a police barricade across from a diner when he heard an explosion.

"I heard a loud boom and then a rapid succession of pop, pop, pop," he said. "It sounded like automatic weapons. And then I heard the second explosion."

He said he could smell something burning and advanced to check it out but area residents at their windows yelled at him, "Hey, it's gunfire! Don't go that way!"

Doctors at a Boston hospital where a suspect in the marathon bombings was taken and later died are saying they treated a man with a possible blast injury and multiple gunshot wounds.

MIT said right after the 10:30 pm shooting that police were sweeping the campus in Cambridge and urged people to remain indoors. They urged people urged to stay away from the Stata Center, a mixed-use building with faculty offices, classrooms and a common area.

The suspects' images were released hours after President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama attended an interfaith service in Boston to remember the dead and the wounded.

At the Cathedral of the Holy Cross, Obama saluted the resolve of the people of Boston and mocked the bombers as "these small, stunted individuals who would destroy instead of build and think somehow that makes them important."

"We will find you," he warned.

In the past, insurgents from Chechnya and neighboring restive provinces in the Caucasus have been involved in terror attacks in Moscow and other places in Russia.

Those raids included a raid in Moscow in October 2002 in which a group of Chechen militants took 800 people hostage and held them for two days before special forces stormed the building, killing all 41 Chechen hostage-takers. Also killed were 129 hostages, mostly from effects of narcotic gas Russian forces used to subdue the attackers.

Chechen insurgents also launched a 2004 hostage-taking raid in the southern Russian town of Beslan, where they took hundreds of hostages. The siege ended in a bloodbath two days later, with more than 330 people, about half of them children, killed.

Insurgents from Chechnya and other regions also have launched a long series of bombings in Moscow and other cities in Russia. An explosion at the international arrivals hall at Moscow's Domodedovo airport in January 2011 killed at least 31 people and wounded more than 140.

AP, Reuters contributed to the report

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