Second marathon bombing suspect in custody outside Boston

Second Boston Marathon bombing suspect taken into custody after nearly two-hour standoff | Bostonians cheer on police | Obama says 'people of Boston refused to be intimidated' | Suspects' father in Russia: 'Someone framed them'

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A massive manhunt that shut down greater Boston for most of Friday came to an end shortly before 9 p.m. when the second bombing suspect, 19-year-old Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev, was taken into custody by law enforcement in the besieged neighborhood of Watertown outside Boston.

He was found inside a boat in the backyard of a home on Franklin Street.

"CAPTURED!!! The hunt is over. The search is done. The terror is over. And justice has won. Suspect in custody." Boston police tweeted on their official Twitter account.

Only three hours earlier as the manhunt was still in full force, Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick at 6 p.m. lifted a regional stay-indoors order, telling the public "we can return to living our lives." The Metropolitan Boston Transportation Agency also began running trains and city transit again this evening.

Then shots were heard by reporters and a frantic scene ensued shortly after 7 p.m. as a seemingly endless stream of police descended on Watertown. Police later released a rough rundown of how Tsarnaev was eventually tracked down in a boat behind a house on Franklin Street in the Boston suburb.

The events began when the two suspects, brothers originally from Chechnya, engaged police in a wild car chase as they hurled explosives out a window in Watertown. One of the brothers was killed in an ensuing shootout. New details Friday afternoon indicated the older brother was shot several times by police, then run over by his younger brother as the suspect fled police.

His brother, Tamerlan, 26, was killed during the earlier shootout.

The brother arrested Friday night dropped the bombs at the race finish lane, Boston Police Commissioner Edward Davis said.

President Barack Obama declared Friday night that the capture of a second suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings "closed an important chapter in this tragedy." But he acknowledged that many unanswered questions remain about the motivations of the two men accused of perpetrating the attacks that unnerved the nation.

"The families of those killed so senselessly deserve answers," said Obama, who branded the suspects "terrorists."

In an interview Friday afternoon, an aunt of the suspects said the older brother recently became a devout Muslim who prayed five times a day, and she doesn't believe the brothers could have been involved in Monday's attack.

The international law enforcement agency INTERPOL had issued "an international security alert, or Orange Notice, detailing the features of the improvised explosive devices used in the Boston marathon bombings to assist law enforcement across its 190 member countries detect any similarly configured bombs," the agency said on its website.

"We're talking about three dead people, 100-something injured, and I do not believe, I just do not believe our boys would do that ... I don't know them in the way that they could be capable of this," Maret Tsarnaeva told reporters in Toronto.

But she said Tamerlan was married and had a 3-year-old daughter in the U.S., she said.

"He has a wife in Boston and from a Christian family, so you can't tie it to religion," she said.

The suspects' father, in an interview with a television station where he lives in the Russian province of Dagestan, called police who killed his son "cowards."

Anzor Tsarnaev also said "someone framed [my sons]."

"I don't know exactly who did it. But someone did," the father said. "And being cowards, they shot the boy [Tamerlan] dead. There are cops like this."

By mid-morning, Massachussets State Police were donning bullet proof vests in the area of Mt. Auburn St. in Watertown. There was shooting heard.  Police scanner reports by police said that there was someone with a device, and that a bomb squad was needed.  However, police radio went silent after that, and no further information was available.

Investigators have not ruled out that Tsarnaev is wearing an explosive vest, according to the Boston Globe.

Authorities later said the suspect was not located at the Watertown site. Investigators were still going door-to-door through the neighborhood early this afternoon.

There are continuing developments in the investigation," Gov. Deval Patrick said. "It is important that folks remain indoors."

The FBI also took evidence boxes into the West New York, N.J., home of a sister of the suspects. The woman told the Newark Star-Ledger that she was "sorry for all the people who lost their lives" and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was "an amazing child." Authorities told the newspaper that the woman was upset but cooperating with authorities.

The University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth evacuated its campus this morning because Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is a registered student at the school, the university said in a statement on its website.

Authorities in Boston suspended all mass transit and warned close to 1 million people in the entire city and some of its suburbs to stay indoors as the hunt went on. Businesses were asked not to open. People waiting at bus and subway stops were told to go home. Amtrak suspended service from Boston to New York.

"All of Boston," should shelter-in-place, Patrick said this morning.

"This is a serious situation," he said. "We're asking the public to take it seriously as well and assist law enforcement by following those simple instructions."

"We believe this to be a terrorist," Davis said of the suspect on the loose. "We believe this to be a man who's come here to kill people. We need to get him in custody."

From Watertown to Cambridge, police surrounded various buildings as they searched for Suspect No. 2. Around 8:30 a.m., officers sprinted toward a house in Watertown, and reporters were pushed back more than a block as helicopters buzzed overhead. SWAT teams, FBI agents and armored vehicles assembled at the scene as sharpshooters across the street trained their guns at the house. They left the house around 9:30 a.m., and a few dozen Boston police officers with assault rifles and helmets then filed into the backyard of a red brick building down the street.

Authorities have shed no light on the motive for the attack and have said it is unclear whether it was the work of domestic or international terrorists or someone else entirely with an unknown agenda.

The men's uncle, Ruslan Tsarni of Montgomery Village, Md., said the brothers traveled here together from the Russian region near Chechnya.  But, he said they are originally from Kyrgyzstan.

"Dzhokhar is a second-year medical student in the U.S. He is such an intelligent boy. We expected him to come on holidays here," the father said.

But Tsarni said at an impromptu press conference, "Of course we're ashamed." He called the brothers "big losers" for their alleged involvement.

The uncle said he last spoke with his nephews about three months ago.

"They put that shame on the entire ethnicity," he said.

The Associated Press also spoke with their father, Anzor Tsarnaev, in a telephone interview from the Russian city of Makhachkala. The father said that his younger son, Dzhokhar, is "a true angel."

The Chechen president issued a statement blaming their American upbringing.

"Any attempt to draw a connection between Chechnya and Tsarnaevs — if they are guilty — is futile," said Chechen president Ramzan Kadyrov. "They were raised in the United States, and their attitudes and beliefs were formed there. It is necessary to seek the roots of this evil in America. The whole world must struggle against terrorism — that we know better than anyone else. We hope for the recovery of all the victims, and we mourn with the Americans."

Meanwhile, Connecticut State Police believed Dzhokar Tsarnaev may have been driving a gray Honda CRV with the Massachusetts plate 316 ES9, and later said that that vehicle was recovered in Boston. It was unoccupied, Boston police said.

In Washington, President Barack Obama met with his national security team in the Situation Room to discuss the bombings investigation, the White House said.

The images released by the FBI depict the two young men walking one behind the other near the finish line. Richard DesLauriers, FBI agent in charge in Boston, said Suspect No. 2 in the white hat was seen setting down a bag at the site of the second of two deadly explosions.

Authorities said surveillance tape recorded late Thursday showed Suspect No. 2 during a robbery of a convenience store in Cambridge, near the campus of MIT, where a university police officer was shot to death while responding to a report of a disturbance, Alben said.

The officer was identified as 26-year-old Sean Collier.

From there, authorities said, the two men carjacked a man in a Mercedes-Benz, keeping him with them in the car for half an hour before releasing him at a gas station in Cambridge. The man was not injured.

The search for the vehicle led to a chase that ended in Watertown, where authorities said the suspects threw explosive devices from the car and exchanged gunfire with police. A transit police officer was seriously injured during the chase, authorities said.

In Watertown, witnesses reported hearing multiple gunshots and explosions at about 1 a.m. Friday. Dozens of police officers and FBI agents were in the neighborhood and a helicopter circled overhead.

Watertown resident Christine Yajko said she was awakened at about 1:30 a.m. by a loud noise, began to walk to her kitchen and heard gunfire.

"I heard the explosion, so I stepped back from that area, then I went back out and heard a second one," she said. "It was very loud. It shook the house a little."

She said a police officer later knocked on her door and told her there was an undetonated improvised explosive device in the street and warned her to stay away from the windows.

"It was on the street, right near our kitchen window," she said.

State police spokesman David Procopio said: "The incident in Watertown did involve what we believe to be explosive devices possibly, potentially, being used against the police officers."

Boston cab driver Imran Saif said he was standing on a street corner at a police barricade across from a diner when he heard an explosion.

"I heard a loud boom and then a rapid succession of pop, pop, pop," he said. "It sounded like automatic weapons. And then I heard the second explosion."

He said he could smell something burning and advanced to check it out but area residents at their windows yelled at him, "Hey, it's gunfire! Don't go that way!"

Doctors at a Boston hospital where Suspect No. 1 died said they treated a man with a possible blast injury and multiple gunshot wounds.

In the past, insurgents from Chechnya and neighboring restive provinces in the Caucasus have been involved in terror attacks in Moscow and other places in Russia.

Those raids included one in Moscow in October 2002 in which a group of Chechen militants took 800 people hostage and held them for two days before special forces stormed the building, killing all 41 Chechen hostage-takers. Also killed were 129 hostages, mostly from effects of narcotic gas Russian forces used to subdue the attackers.

Chechen insurgents also launched a 2004 hostage-taking raid in the southern Russian town of Beslan, where they took hundreds of hostages. The siege ended in a bloodbath two days later, with more than 330 people, about half of them children, killed.

Insurgents from Chechnya and other regions also have launched a long series of bombings in Moscow and other cities in Russia. An explosion at the international arrivals hall at Moscow's Domodedovo airport in January 2011 killed at least 31 people and wounded more than 140.

Information from the Associated Press was used this report.