Suspects’ Aunt Threats: Maret Tsarnaeva Says Nephews Are Victims Of Conspiracy And She's Recieved Threats By Phone

The aunt of Boston bombing suspects Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev said that she has been the target of threats after she claimed to various media outlets last Friday that her nephews were framed. Maret Tsarnaeva, who is a trainee lawyer living in Toronto, told the Sun News that she had received phone calls telling her "it's time to go home," and said that if she did rejoin her family in the Russian region of Dagestan, it would be "only with the bodies of my nephews."

"They are calling us, calling names, threatening, saying it's time to go home," Maret Tsarnaeva, 45, said last Saturday. "We did not find that promise -- democracy -- in this country."

The single mother of a four-year-old boy told the Daily Mail that she would fly to Massachusetts to protest her nephews' innocence, having promised their father that she would be there for her surviving nephew "until the end of this ugly journey." The suspects' father returned to Russia after he was beaten up on the street in Boston in what Maret Tsarnaeva called "an unexplained attack." The father previously called Dzhokhar, the youngest son, a "true angel," and he and the mother are said to share in the opinion of the aunt that the brothers were incapable of the act.

The suspects' uncle, who lives in Maryland, has called his nephews "losers" who shamed their community.

The Daily Mail reported that Maret said she had last seen her nephews five years ago and spoken to Tamerlan on the phone a year ago. She told the newspaper that "people read too much into that" and dismissed the attack on the suspects' father which occasioned his return to Russia as "unimportant," and urged people to listen to what friends, teachers and coaches of the suspects had said of them.

The older brother was a standout boxer while the younger was the captain of his high school wrestling team. The younger also won a scholarship from the city of Cambridge to attend college at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth.

The older, Tamerlan, was questioned by the FBI in 2011 after the Russian government relayed intelligence saying he might have ties to Islamist terrorist groups. His mother told Russia Today that her family had been under constant FBI surveillance since then and that she could not believe that the agency would not have known about any plans her son might have had for an attack.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev was killed in a shootout with police. Dzhokhar, the younger brother, was wounded and is currently in serious but stable condition.