Residents in the entire city of Boston were urged to stay indoors, as thousands of officers hunted for 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, known as Suspect No. 2. His older brother, 26-year-old Tamerlan Tsarnaev, was killed in a police shootout Thursday night.
Ruslan Tsarni of Montgomery Village, Md., said his nephews are ethnic Chechens, but they came from a Russian region near Chechnya and lived together on Norfolk Street in Cambridge. Tsarni said the two had been in the country since 2003.
"Dzhokhar, if you're alive, turn yourself in and ask for forgiveness from the victims, from the injured," Tsarni said. "Ask forgiveness from these people."
Asked what he thought provoked the bombings, Tsarni said: "Being losers, hatred to those who were able to settle themselves. These are the only reasons I can imagine of. Anything else, anything else to do with religion, with Islam, it's a fraud, it's a fake."
"He put a shame on our family. He put a shame on the entire Chechen ethnicity. Because everyone now names, they play with word Chechnya, so they put that shame on the entire ethnicity," Tsarni said.
He emphasized that the suspects had never been in Chechnya and had nothing to do with Chechnya.
"I teach my children, and that's what I feel myself, (the U.S.) is the ideal micro world in entire world. I respect this country, I love this country," Tsarni said. "This country, which gives chance to everybody else, to be treated as a human being, and to be human being."
He told reporters that the last time he saw the brothers was December 2005, and at that time, neither had terrorism training or displayed any ill will to the U.S.
"Somebody radicalized them, but it wasn't my brother," Tsarni said of his brother, the suspect's father, who lives in Dagestan, a Russian republic. "It's not my brother, who just moved back to Russia, who spent his life bringing bread to their table. Fixing cars. He didn't have time or chance or anything. He's been working, that's it."
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
