8 year old Martin was a victim of the attack waiting for his dad to cross the finish line. His sign says it all. RIP

^^^^
Jesus Christ. Heartbreaking .

It is odd that none of the usual suspects in the Muslim world are not taking "credit" for this horror. Any chance it could be another home grown job like in Okla City or Atlanta? A lot of nut cases out there have been listening to the irresponsible cries for "Second Amendment Remedies."

Not this house. They did search a house with the owners permission, if i'm not mistaken the saudi national they were questioning, but that house in revere they had a search warrant.

So did they search TWO houses?

I didn't hear about a second house, so I don't know.



TIS

Warning some are graphic

http://www.buzzfeed.com/ryanhatesthis/first-photos-from-the-scene-of-the-boston-marathon-explosion

Yea they searched the house of the saudi national they were questioning but found nothing. This house the state police had a search warrant and took out bags of things. The address of the second house has had issues before, its an apartment complex and last year a guy from morocco was arrested there for indecent assault of a person 14 or older and arson.

The New York Post has spoken to the roommate of the Saudi man whose apartment authorities searched yesterday. Mohammed Badawood described the man "quiet and clean" and as "a good boy" who was not capable of such an attack.
Worth stressing: the injured Saudi has not been charged with anything and, as far as we know, is not under arrest.

Hey, who was that guy SC kicked off the baords?

I'm not paying attention to the ny post, they were saying 12 dead yesterday yet there's only 3. however that's not the house they had the warrant for. they found parts like a circuit board so they're thinking it was on a timer.

"To Boston, from Kabul, with love"

http://principlepictures.com/blog/2013/04/16/to-boston-from-kabul-with-love/

Boston police say a photo taken in the wake of the attack that appears to show a man on a rooftop over the crime scene has been sent to the FBI, and will be analyzed along with hundreds of other images. - from ABC

The Boston Globe has identified a second victim of the marathon bombings as Krystle Campbell, 29, of Arlington, Massachusetts, a northwestern Boston suburb. The Globe reports:

She went to watch the Marathon every year and was there with a friend this year. The friend is hospitalized with serious injuries.

The third person killed in the attack has not been publicly identified.

20m ago
Boston native Richard Clarke, the former national coordinator for counter-terrorism, has posted an 850-word piece on Facebook entitled

How they will investigate the Boston Bombing

While detectives and federal agents have started the laborious process of interviewing thousands of people in Boston, much of the work that is likely to be key to solving the Boston Bombing is technical and forensic.

First, the FBI will stitch together hundreds of hours of video camera recordings from private and public surveillance and traffic cameras, as well as recordings made by private citizens attending the race. They will look for when the bombs might have been left behind and then examine the faces of everyone who was in the area around that time. They will try to put names to those faces, using facial recognition matching software, drawing on drivers license, passport, and visa databases. In the case of the Mossad operation in Dubai, the police in the United Arab Emirates were able to recreate most of the the assassination operation by using snippets from dozens of surveillance cameras. For the FBI in Boston, a similar process has now begun.

Second, FBI and NSA will look at phone records. If the bombs were command detonated using mobile phones to trigger the blast, it may be possible to find out what phone numbers were used by seeing what numbers were called on that block or in that neighborhood at exactly the time of the blasts. The FBI will look at calls that went through specific cell towers in the Copley Square-Prudential Center neighborhood of Back Bay. There will be many innocent calls made at that time, but if some of the calls went to unregistered mobile numbers (an unregistered phone is a mobile device bought at a convenience store without providing a telephone company a user name, relying instead on pre-paid calling cards), those “burner phones” may have been the detonators.

The FBI will want to find out who bought the “burner phones” used to make the calls and to receive them. It may be possible to determine where the phones were sold and when. If they were sold at a convenience store like a CVS or 7-11, there may be store surveillance camera video of customers present when the phones were sold. An image of the buyer could then be made public in the hope that someone will come forward to identify the face.

NSA will also look for calls from the Boston area around the time of the blast to suspicious numbers in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen and other Middle East locations. If it were an Islamist attack (which is by no means certain), the bomber may have checked in with fellow terrorists before or after the strike. FBI will check chat rooms and blog posts on right wing American extremists groups to see if there is any sign that people in that sub-culture knew about the attack before it happened or have guesses about who may have done it.

Third, FBI (perhaps with help from ATF) will try to reassemble the bombs by gathering as many tiny fragments of material as possible., as they did in the case of the bombing of Pan Am 103 and Oklahoma City. Already they have informed guesses about the explosive material and the fragmentation material. They will collect fragments from the buildings, the temporary crowd control fence that lined Boylston Street and, regrettably, from the severed limbs of the victims. Next, the FBI will try to determine if a bomb design was used based upon a specific “how to make a bomb” web page on the Internet. Law enforcement authorities will try to determine where the bomb materials and the back pack or other carrying case were purchased.

Fourth, Homeland Security investigators will examine who flew out of Boston, especially to foreign locations, around the time of the bombing. In the 1993 World Trade Center attack and the CIA Headquarters-Route 123 shootings, attackers moved quickly to the airport to get out of the country.

Fifth, police and federal agents will contact all of their informants in Islamist cells and American Right Wing and Aryan Supremacist groups. They will offer rewards for leads, for suspicions. Unless the attack was done by a self-initiated loner (which is highly possible), the bomber or bombers will tell someone eventually of their involvement. Alternatively, as in the case of the Unibomber, a family member may call the police when they realize that their brother, husband, or son may have been involved.

In major investigations such as these, the case is usually solved either very quickly due to a lucky break or it takes months of painful detailed work. Sometimes, as in the Atlanta Olympic bombing and the TWA 800 crash, the investigation may go down a mistaken path for a time. However long it takes, these cases do get solved. For me, a Bostonian who grew up watching the end of so many Marathons, spent so many days hanging out in Copley Square, this attack feels personal. The eight year old boy who died was from the Dorchester neighborhood, “Dot”, where I lived when I was an eight year old boy. For that boy and the other victims, this case will be solved and the criminal terrorist will be apprehended.

apparently the bombs were placed inside pressure cookers which is why the dogs couldn't detect them.

http://touch.latimes.com/#section/-1/article/p2p-75440765/

The Pakistani Taliban deny any involvement in the attack. I'm inclined to believe them, they totally would've claimed responsibility for this

Here's a pic of the other confirmed dead -

RIP

The Guardian's Ed Pilkington is in Boston, where he picks up on a "bit of good news to emerge from the grisliness." Ed notes that Dr. George Velmahos, the chief trauma surgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital, said "some critical patients have woken up and others are stabilizing":

SI has released the image of next week's cover.

'Someone knows who did this'
DesLauriers says "around the world" the force of the United States is working hard to catch the culprits. He says the FBI has received more than 2,000 tips.

"Regarding who might be suspected, the investigation is in its infancy," he says.

"At this time there are no claims of responsibility. The range of suspects and motives remains wide open."

He says that whoever did this has friends or family who know about it. "We're asking anyone who may have heard someone speak about the marathon, or about the date of April 15 in any way, to call us."

DesLauriers adds: "Someone knows who did this."

He asks business to preserve any surveillance video in "original form."

DesLauriers urges anyone to come forward if they observed or heard of anyone researching bombmaking, or heard noises of explosions in remote areas.

He also encourages anyone to step forward who saw "someone who appeared to be carrying an unusually dark, heavy bag yesterday in the vicinity of the blasts."

FBI agent Rick DesLauriers is asked to describe the bombs further, but he demurs. He says there was "possibly a pressure cooker" and "black nylon bags possibly at both sites."

"The would not have been light bags," he says.

The one problem with trying to find people who had a big heavy dark bag is, i've seen photos from around that area all day and almost everyone had some sort of big or dark bag or backpack with them.

Davis says this year's race had a stronger security presence than usual:

We review each one of these events. At the end of our review last year, we determined that the crowds were larger than usual. And so we put additional officers at the end of the race," the police commissioner says.

There was no specific threat about this event ... this was a standard threat picture.

Davis says undercover officers were "fully deployed" among the crowd as were bomb-sniffing dogs.

DesLauriers declines to address a question about a circuit board reportedly found around the attack site. "That was brought up by a member of the media, not by me," the FBI agent says.

He's asked about the third, as-yet unidentified fatality. "There has not been enough work done to make a notification to the next of kin on the third victim," DesLauriers says.

I completely agree it's kind of a thin lead but i must say no Country reacts anywhere near as quick or as efficiently to these attacks than the US.


49m ago
DesLauriers goes on to explain why the FBI is interested in pressure cookers.

Pressure cookers – they're relatively ordinary cooking devices. As far as precisely what evidence was found – there are multiple pieces of evidence at the crime scene. That analysis is ongoing right now.

What could possibly be a pressure cooker was found at the site, and we're putting that out to the public to possibly generate any leads.

Michael Crowley delivers "A short recent history of pressure cooker bombs" in Time Magazine:

As it happens, pressure cookers have a nefarious reputation in counterterrorism circles. In 2004, the Department of Homeland Security was concerned enough about pressure cooker bombs to issue an alert to federal and state security officials: “A technique commonly taught in Afghan terrorist training camps is the use/conversion of pressure cookers into IEDs,” the bulletin warned.

That bulletin cited several plots from 2002 to 2004 to use pressure cooker bombs in France, India and Nepal. But more recently there have been at least three other instances of would-be terrorists in the west, all of them Islamic radicals, in possession of pressure cookers for reasons that seemed not to involve having friends over for dinner ...

But it’s important to bear in mind that the ability to make these bombs is hardly unique to al Qaeda and its sympathizers. Members of at least one prominent white supremacist website have shared terror tips from Inspire [a radical Islamic magazine] which one called “highly recommended reading.” Pressure cooker bombs are also discussed in detail on this anarchist site, which describes how to build what is “affectionately known as a HELLHOUND.”

Here's a summary of where things stand -

• A pressure-cooker bomb is believed to have been used at one or both of the explosion sites. The FBI announced Tuesday afternoon that investigators have recovered crime scene evidence including "pieces of black nylon, which could be from a backpack, and fragments of BBs and nails possibly contained in a pressure cooker device." The evidence is being shipped to an FBI lab in Quantico for analysis.

• Authorities called for tips from anyone who witnessed a person carrying a dark, unusually heavy bag in the vicinity of the bombing. In addition they asked the public to report anyone who had been talking about a pressure-cooker bomb or "the marathon, or about the date of April 15 in any way." "Someone knows who did this," FBI agent Rick DesLauriers said.

• President Obama will attend an interfaith prayer service in Boston Thursday morning, the Massachusetts governor announced. The president has canceled a trip he was to take to Kansas on Friday. More than a dozen vigils were planned in Boston for Tuesday and Wednesday.

• Three people were killed in the attack, including Krystle Campbell, 29, and Martin Richard, 8. The third fatality is believed to have been a graduate student at Boston University. The school confirmed the death but did not name the victim "pending permission to do so from the family." At least 176 people were wounded in the attack. An unknown number remain in critical condition. Other patients showed improvement.

• No suspects have been identified and no motive has been determined in the marathon bombing, authorities said.

• The city of Boston has established a fund, called One Boston, to provide for victims of the attack and their families.

I italicized and bolded those separate parts because they do go together in that statement, but that could lead to A LOT of false leads and tips since thats a huge event here so i'm sure half, if not all, of the state has been talking about the marathon or the date.