The KGB keeps better track of extremists in the US than the FBI does. [View all]

[dkf]

The significance of the trip was magnified late Friday when the F.B.I. disclosed in a statement that in 2011 “a foreign government” — now acknowledged by officials to be Russia — asked for information about Tamerlan, “based on information that he was a follower of radical Islam and a strong believer, and that he had changed drastically since 2010 as he prepared to leave the United States for travel to the country’s region to join unspecified underground groups.”

The senior law enforcement official said the Russians feared he could be a risk, and “they had something on him and were concerned about him, and him traveling to their region.”

But the F.B.I. never followed up on Tamerlan once he returned, a senior law enforcement acknowledged on Saturday, adding that the bureau had not kept tabs on him until he was identified on Friday as the first suspect in the marathon bombing case.



A Russian intelligence official told the Interfax news service on Saturday that Russia had not been able to provide the United States with “operatively significant” information about the Tsarnaev brothers, “because the Tsarnaev brothers had not been living in Russia.”

Andrei Soldatov, an investigative journalist who specializes in Russia’s security services, said he believes that Tamerlan may have attracted the attention of Russian intelligence because of the video clips he had posted under his own name starting in 2010, which were included on a list of banned materials by the Federal Security Service, or F.S.B.

At that point, the agency had just begun routinely scrutinizing materials posted on social networks, and would most likely have sent a request to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, said Mr. Soldatov, the author of “The New Nobility: The Restoration of Russia’s Security State and the Enduring Legacy of the K.G.B.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/21/us/boston-marathon-bombings.html?pagewanted=2&_r=0&hp