Exclusive: Imam of Mosque Visited by Bombing Suspect Speaks to TIME

[Time]

The old imam cringes at the sound of that name—Tamerlan Tsarnaev—furrowing his brow into a bed of creases as he sighs and looks away. There is about half an hour left until the next call to Friday prayers, and he is seated in the third-floor office of his mosque in the city of Makhachkala in southern Russia. At last he indulges the question: "None of our men, not a single person, has ever known him or ever seen him." It is a mantra that Imam Khasan-Khadzhi Gasanaliev has had to repeat for journalists many times this week, ever since it emerged that Tsarnaev, the suspected bomber of the Boston Marathon, had attended services at the mosque on Kotrova Street. The mosque upholds a more fundamentalist version of Islam than others in the region of Dagestan, and it has been known as a place of worship for suspected terrorists in Russia. On Thursday, Tsarnaev's father Anzor admitted that his son had gone there for services during a six-month visit he made to Dagestan last year. "He went with me," the elder Tsarnaev told a press conference on Thursday in Makhachkala. "We went wherever there was space. There was not always space on Kotrova. It's small." He added: "But he had no friends there. You don't make friends that fast around here." Investigators have not revealed any links between Tsarnaev and any Islamist groups, nor have they explained his alleged motives. But his acquaintances and members of his family have said that he became an adherent of fundamentalist Islam in the years before the bombings. The other suspect in the Boston attacks, Tsarnaev's younger brother Dzhokhar, told investigators from his hospital bed this week that he and his brother were motivated by the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to a report in the Washington Post that cited U.S. officials familiar with the investigation. (MORE: Will the Boston Bomber Be Executed?) The officials told the Post that the Tsarnaev brothers were "self-radicalized," meaning that their views were shaped by what they saw

Via: TIME GlobalSpin