Post date: May 10, 2013 9:26:22 PM
Virginia officials say they were taken by surprise that Boston marathon suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev was buried in a cemetery in their county.
DOSWELL, VIRGINIA, UNITED STATES (MAY 10, 2013) (NBC) - Boston Marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev has been buried in a Muslim cemetery in Virginia, after authorities spent a week searching for a final resting place for the ethnic Chechen's remains.
The body of Tsarnaev, who was killed in an April 19 shootout with police, was moved earlier this week from the Graham Putnam & Mahoney funeral home inWorcester, Massachusetts, police there said on Thursday (May 9).The funeral home had faced unrelenting protests over the past week as it struggled to find a cemetery willing to accept the body. And the controversy continued on Friday (May 10) when officials from Caroline County, Virginia, where the cemetery is located, said they were taken by surprise and were reviewing the burial to make sure it was legal.
"It caught all of us off guard. None of us here, before you, knew anything about this,"Caroline County Sheriff Tony Lippa said.
Floyd Thomas, chairman of the Caroline County Board of Supervisors, said they were making sure everything was done legally.
"This was a horrific act. This was a terrible crime. We don't want the county to be remembered as the resting place of the remains of someone who committed a terrible crime," Thomas said, adding "What we would do is make sure that all of the laws regarding this particular burial were adhered to. If they were not, then I believe we would have to look at undoing what happened."
Tsarnaev, 26, and his brother Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, were suspected by theFederal Bureau of Investigation of setting off bombs at the finish line of the Boston Marathon on April 15, killing three people and injuring 264. Dzhokhar is in a prison west of Boston after being charged with crimes that could carry the death penalty if he is convicted.
On Friday, the city of Boston released an updated death certificate for Tsarnaev showing that he was buried in Al-Barzakh Muslim Cemetery in Doswell, Virginia, outside Richmond.
Tsarnaev, an ethnic Chechen who lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for much of the past decade, had been on a U.S. government database of potential terrorism suspects. The United States had twice been warned by Russia that he might be an Islamic militant, according to U.S. security officials.
His body was moved from the Boston medical examiner's office to the Worcester funeral home, but his family did not claim the body and the cities of Boston andCambridge refused to accept his remains.
Worcester police said on Thursday a person had approached them with a solution for the body after a public plea for help. Police withheld the identify of that person.