Tamerlan Tsarnaev AP FILE PHOTO
NEW YORK — The city of Cambridge, Massachusetts wants to make one thing clear: they do not want the late Boston bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev buried in their town.
Tsarnaev, 26, and his 19-year-old brother Dzhokhar — who is currently hospitalized and facing terror charges — are accused of having carried out the April 15 bombings at the Boston Marathon that killed three people and wounded more than 260.
Although he was an ethnic Chechen born in the former Soviet Union, Tamerlan Tsarnaev spent the last decade in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Cambridge City Manager Robert Healy issued a statement Sunday saying he did not want Tsarnaev buried in his jurisdiction.
“The difficult and stressful efforts of the residents of the city of Cambridge to return to a peaceful life would be adversely impacted by the turmoil, protests and wide spread media presence at such an interment,” Healy’s statement read.
He then quoted state law that said the city manager’s duty is to be the main keeper of the peace within the city. “I have determined that it is not in the interest of ‘peace within the city’ to execute a cemetery deed for a plot within the Cambridge Cemetery for the body of Tamerlin Tsarnaev,” Healy wrote.
Tsarnaev’s uncle Ruslan Tsarni, who blasted the brothers as “losers” soon after the bombing, traveled from the state of Maryland Sunday with relatives to the funeral home where Tamerlan’s body is being held and prepared it for burial in accordance with Muslim rituals.
The body is currently at the Graham, Putnam and Mahoney Funeral Parlor in Worcester, a suburb of the greater Boston area.
Funeral director Peter Stefan however told reporters he has not found a cemetery in the state willing to take the body.
“We have to bury this guy. Whatever it is, whoever he is, in this country we bury people,” Stefan told local media on Sunday.
Protesters meanwhile have gathered outside the funeral home waving US flags and clutching signs demanding that the body be sent to Russia. A local activist has even started a fund to ship out the body.
“I’m left alone to deal with this matter,” Tsarni told reporters outside the funeral home. “His home country was indeed Cambridge, Massachusetts for the last ten years.”
Tamerlan Tsarnaev died of gunshot wounds and blunt trauma to his head and torso while fleeing police after engaging in a shoot-out three days after the bombing.