Bombing suspect kept low profile while in Russia

If Tamerlan Tsarnaev was already plotting the Boston Marathon bombings when he stayed in this bustling city at the heart of Islamist insurgency last year, neighbours say he hid it well.

The ethnic Chechen killed in a shoot-out with US police last week spent at least a month last summer helping his father renovate his first-floor apartment next door to a dentistry in Makhachkala, a city in the Dagestan region on the Caspian Sea.

Neighbours say they saw little of Tsarnaev while he was staying in the run-down, five-storey apartment bloc, and those who knew him saw nothing unusual.

US investigators say Tamerlan spent six months in Russia last year. Although few details have been released about what he did in Russia, neighbours say he spent at least a few weeks in Dagestan, a predominantly Muslim region in the North Caucasus mountains.

Dagestan is the focal point of the insurgency in the North Caucasus where militants wage almost daily violence to establish an Islamist state. Residents of the city of half a million are so used to the violence, they are surprised by what they see as the fuss over the Boston bombings.

“What’s there to say? We’re used to this. There are bomb blasts and rebels everywhere,” said Galia Sulemanan, 55.

The Caucasian Knot website, which monitors the violence, says 124 people were killed and 75 wounded in the first three months of his year in predominantly Muslim Russian provinces that stretch almost from the Caspian to the Black Sea, and include Dagestan and Chechnya.

“Such things (as in Boston) are always upsetting but you know this happens every day here. We’re surprised by the huge reaction,” said Magomed, a young man in a black leather jacket who declined to give his full name. “Americans think they are some kind of ‘super people’, like their lives are more important than others; they’re the world’s police. We have enough of our own problems to worry about it.”