Feds ask to interview wife of suspected bomber

PROVIDENCE, R.I. — Federal authorities have asked to speak with the wife of suspected Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev, and her lawyer said he is discussing with them how to proceed.

Amato DeLuca told The Associated Press on Sunday that Katherine Russell Tsarnaev did not speak to federal officials who came to her parents’ home in North Kingstown, R.I., Sunday evening, where she has been staying since her husband was killed during a getaway attempt early Friday.

Tsarnaev, 26, and his brother, Dzhokhar, 19, two ethnic Chechen brothers from southern Russia, are accused of planting two explosives near the marathon finish line Monday, killing three people and injuring more than 180. A motive remains unclear.

DeLuca said he spoke with the officials instead, but would not offer further details.

“I spoke to them, and that’s all I can say right now,” he said. “We’re deciding what we want to do and how we want to approach this.”

DeLuca also offered new details on Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s movements in the days after the bombings, saying the last day he was alive that “he was home” when his wife left for work. When asked whether anything seemed amiss to his wife following the bombings, DeLuca responded, “Not as far as I know.” He said she learned her husband was a suspect in the bombings by seeing it on TV. He would not elaborate.

DeLuca said his client did not suspect her husband of anything, and that there was no reason for her to have suspected him. He said she had been working 70 to 80 hours, seven days a week as a home health care aide. While she was at work, her husband cared for their toddler daughter, DeLuca said.

“When this allegedly was going on, she was working, and had been working all week to support her family,” he told the AP.

He said Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was off at college and she saw him “not at all” at the apartment they shared with her mother-in-law.

Katherine Russell Tsarnaev was attending Suffolk University in Boston when friends introduced her to her future husband at a nightclub, DeLuca said. They dated on and off, then married in 2009 or 2010, he said.

She was raised Christian, but at some point after meeting Tamerlan Tsarnaev, she converted to Islam, he said. When asked why she converted, he replied: “She believes in the tenets of Islam and of the Koran. She believes in God.”