A new character appeared over the weekend in the saga of the Boston bombings–Mahmud Mansur Nidal, a teenage Islamist with a thin black beard, round face and gently slanted eyes. In the months before his death last year during a shootout with Russian police, Nidal reportedly met numerous times with Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the prime suspect in the bombing of the Boston Marathon last month. U.S. investigators are now trying to learn more about the alleged contacts between the two men–and to piece together a biography that the police cut short when Nidal hurled a grenade at them last May. According to Shamil Mutaev, a former investigator who worked on Nidal's case, Nidal was born in 1992 in the town of Buynaksk in the mountains of central Dagestan. His father, who was of Palestinian descent, left the family when Nidal was a child and moved to Moscow, from where the father often traveled abroad. Nidal's mother, Zarina Mansur, is an ethnic Kumyk, one of the dozens of ethnic groups that populate Dagestan, a troubled republic in the south of Russia. She raised Nidal mostly on her own after his father left, Mutaev says. (MORE: Five Questions in Congress About the Boston Bombings) In his late teens, Nidal got involved with a group of Islamist insurgents based in the forests around the village of Gubden. "He was young and pliable. His father wasn't around. It didn't take much to pull him in," says Mutaev, who worked for 32 years in the justice system in Dagestan, first as a prosecutor and later as a detective. By the age of 18 or 19 Nidal had joined the insurgent group that operates in and around Makhachkala, the capital of Dagestan, according to statements released last year by Russia's National Anti-Terrorism Committee, which is known as NAK. One of the bloodiest attacks ever attributed to the so-called Makhachkala Gang took place on May 3, 2012. At around 10 pm that evening, a red Mitsubishi sedan pulled up to a police checkpoint on the outskirts of Makhachkala(http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=world.time.com&blog=19871253&post=84778&subd=timeglobalspin&ref=&feed=1)
Via: TIME GlobalSpin