Two Kazakhstani students in the United States are still being held in Boston as American investigators probe their possible connection to Djokhar Tsarnaev, the 19-year-old charged with carrying out the Boston Marathon bombings.
The Boston Globe reported that the two students were taken into custody on April 20 in the city of New Bedford, about 60 miles southwest of Boston, ostensibly on suspicion of violating the terms of their student visas. According an April 23 report distributed by the Kazakhstani news website KTK, one of the student visa violations being cited by US authorities is the two students reportedly skipped “several classes at [their] university.”
A statement issued by Kazakhstan’s Foreign Ministry said a US-based diplomat from the Central Asian state was in Boston “to work with the US authorities and liaise with the detained students and their families. There are no complaints from our citizens about their physical condition and the treatment by the US law enforcement bodies.”
US investigators have declined to identify the two students. Authorities carried out an extensive search of the students’ apartment on April 20, seeking clues that could shed light on their possible ties to Tsarnaev, who was a student at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth, located just a few miles from New Bedford, a coastal city that was a center of the whaling industry in the 19th century.
Kazakhstani media outlets have identified the detained pair as Dias Kadyrbayev and Azamat Tazhayakov. The pair has not been charged with any crime, KTK reported, citing diplomatic sources. According to some media reports, Kadyrbayev and Tazhayakov attracted the attention of US authorities because a car reportedly belonging to the two had an unauthorized license plate on the front of the vehicle with the inscription “Terrorista # 1” written on it. Massachusetts law requires all vehicles belonging to residents of the state to display officially issued license plates on the front and back of the vehicle.
A photo of the car with the “Terrorista” license plate appeared on Djokhar Tsarnaev’s Twitter feed.
Friends of the Kazakhstani pair have gone on record as saying they are good kids. Aigerim Amirkhanova, identified by KTK as a friend of Tazhayakov, attributed the license plate flap to a “youthful joke.”She went on to say that Tazhayakov’s parents “were astounded” when they found out that their son had been detained.
Yuri Dovgal, an administrator at a school in Almaty that Kadyrbayev attended, described him as a “weak” student, KTK reported.
Since 1993, Kazakhstan has spent millions of dollars under its Bolashak Program to enable students, both on the undergraduate and graduate levels, to attend universities in the United States. According to the Kazakhstani Embassy in Washington, over 6,500 Kazakhstani students have received Bolashak scholarships. The program enabled roughly 3,000 Kazakhstanis to receive bachelor’s, master’s and doctorate degrees from American universities. Presently, according to an embassy statement, there are “815 Bolashak scholars attending 42 US universities.”
This article was updated on May 2, 2013, to correct a misspelling of one of the suspects' names. An earlier version of the post identified Dias Kadyrbayev as Dias Kalyrbayev.
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