Information about the two men suspected of bombing the Boston Marathon is flying in, and the story is developing.  But what is perfectly clear is that one suspect was killed by police and the other is on the run.

The FBI and Police in Massachusetts are hunting the second of two suspects in the Boston Marathon Bombing.  The suspects are 26-year old Tamerlan Tsarnaev, killed in a running battle with police, and his younger brother 19-year old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who got away for now.  The two men allegedly shot and killed a campus cop at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) leading into the gunfight in which people were carjacked and the brothers allegedly lobbed explosives at cops.  Schools, businesses, and public transportation in Boston are locked down during the intense dragnet.

What was the motivation for the bombing?  Tamerlan Tsarnaev apparently had a YouTube account with a bunch of videos about terrorism, Islam, and Chechen separatism.  Younger brother Dzhokhar had accounts on the Russian social network Vkontakte in which he describes his worldview as “Islam”, and on Twitter where he really doesn’t say a lot except occasionally expressing his wish to return to the Caucuses.  They had lived in America for at least 10 years.  The older brother may have been in the US for a much longer time and some reports say he may have even arrived earlier than that.

The Tsarnaev brothers’ father lives in the Russian city of Makhachkala, which is the capital of the Russian republic of Dagestan.  “My son is a true angel,” Anzor Tsarnaev told reporters, “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.”

But their Uncle Ruslan Tsarni who lives near Washington, D.C. has a different view.  He blasted the family, saying the brothers had brought disgrace on the family and on the Chechen people, and that older brother Tamerlan deserved to die.  This was an amazing impromptu news conference.

The brothers identify as ethic Chechens, but as Uncle Ruslan points out, they never even visited there (as far as he knows).  One was born in Russian Dagestan and one in Kyrgyzstan.  Chechnya is a semi-autonomous area of Russia, which tried and failed to gain independence when the USSR broke up in the 1990s.  Hundred have died in the separatists' ongoing campaign.  Russia has been accused of brutality in putting down Chechen separatists, whom President Valdimir Putin calls terrorists.  But the nature of Chechen separatism has really been all about borders in the Caucuses, and not about the United States.