MOSCOW — In a few months, starting last August, the YouTube account in the name of Tamerlan Tsarnaev took on an increasingly puritanical religious tone. It moved from secular militancy to Islamist certainty.
It seemed to mirror the wars in the Caucasus, which shifted from a separatist conflict in Chechnya in the 1990s to a jihadist campaign that continues to this day in neighboring Dagestan.
Tsarnaev, a 26-year-old ethnic Chechen believed to have been one of the Boston Marathon bombers, died after a shootout with police in Watertown, Mass., on Thursday night. His younger brother Dzhokhar, arrested and hospitalized Friday night, is the only other suspect.
The exact trajectory of Tsarnaev's journey into radicalism is still emerging, but it first surfaced in 2011 when he somehow entered the radar of the Russian security services. It accelerated in late 2012 upon his return to the United States from a six-month visit to the Caucasus, when friends and relatives noticed a new religious and political fervor. And it ended in violent death after he was identified by the FBI as one of the suspects in a coordinated bombing that killed three and injured more than 170 near the finish line of Monday's race.
The motivation of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, is less clear, and federal agents have not interrogated him in any depth because he is recovering from gunshot wounds.
"The influence of the older brother could have been critical," said Bruce Hoffman, a professor of security studies at Georgetown University. He said the possible role of the older man reminded him of 2007 bombings in London, in which a cell leader radicalized the youngest member of the group. In that case, the teenage bomber "was much more impressionable and much more a follower."
A Russian security agency asked the FBI for information on Tsarnaev in early 2011, almost certainly because of communications with individuals in Russia or other activity on the Internet that brought him to their attention.
The FBI, in a statement released Friday night, said it scrutinized Tsarnaev and visited him and his family in 2011, but found no grounds for further action. After two months, the file on Tsarnaev was closed, according to a U.S. law enforcement official.
The Russian request had mentioned a concern that Tsarnaev was headed to a "region" in his homeland — most likely Dagestan — to join an underground group. The American agency said it asked its Russian counterpart for more information, but it received no response.
Although the United States and Russia have some limited exchange of information on counterterrorism matters, there is little real cooperation, and the security relationship has been damaged by broader diplomatic tensions between the two countries.
"My sense is that the cooperation is not very good," said Thomas Hegghammer, a senior research fellow at the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment in Oslo. "And that may be why in this particular case the Russian information was taken with a pinch of salt."
Russian security agencies have little interest in actual cooperation or joint operations, said Andrei Soldatov, co-author of the book "The New Nobility: The Restoration of Russia's Security State and the Enduring Legacy of the KGB" – despite a Kremlin announcement Saturday that President Obama and President Vladimir Putin had agreed to step up combined anti-terror efforts.
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