FOXNews.com: Lawmaker suggests Boston bombing suspects had training ahead of attack

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Lawmaker suggests Boston bombing suspects had training ahead of attack Apr 28th 2013, 14:46 The chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee said Sunday he thinks the Boston Marathon bombing suspects were trained in carrying out the attack. Chairman Rep. Michael McCaul told "Fox News Sunday" he thinks suspects Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev had help, considering the device's level of sophistication and the type of device -- a shrapnel-packed, pressure-cooker bomb. "That leads me to believe there was a trainer," the Texas Republican said. Homemade bombs built from pressure cookers have been a frequent weapon of militants in Afghanistan, India and Pakistan. Al Qaeda's branch in Yemen once published an online manual on how to make one. McCaul also said he thinks the suspects' mother, Zubeidat Tsarnaeva, played "a very strong role" in her Muslim sons' radicalization process and that if she were to return to the United States from Russia, she'd be held for questioning. The suspects are ethnic Chechens who emigrated from southern Russia to the Boston area over the past 11 years. They purportedly dropped, then detonated two bombs near the finish line of the race, killing three and injuring more than 260 others. The 26-year-old Tamerlan was killed several days after the attack in a shootout with police. The 19-year-old Dzhokhar was captured in the manhunt and is now at a medical detention center. McCaul also was critical of the Obama administration, saying just days after the deadly April 15 bombings there was no foreign terrorist connection to the suspects. "They just got captured," McCaul said. "Yet the narrative being played out by the administration is there is no connection. … It's a rush to judgment." He said the FBI just got a hold of a computer used by at least one of the suspects and that agents have just arrived in Russia and the surrounding region. "It's the right of the American people to see where the investigation goes," McCaul said. In addition, the Associated Press reported that Russian authorities secretly recorded a telephone conversation in 2011 in which one of the suspects vaguely discussed jihad with his mother, according to U.S. officials speaking Saturday, days after the U.S. government finally received details about the call. In another conversation, the mother of now-dead bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev was recorded talking to someone in southern Russia who is under FBI investigation in an unrelated case, officials said. The conversations are significant because, had they been revealed earlier, they might have been enough evidence for the FBI to initiate a more thorough investigation of the Tsarnaev family. As it was, Russian authorities told the FBI only that they had concerns that Tamerlan and his mother were religious extremists. With no additional information, the FBI conducted a limited inquiry and closed the case in June 2011. Meanwhile, Rep. Jason Chaffetz on Friday said he's not convinced the two brothers suspected in the Boston Marathon bombings acted alone and suggested they may be part of a broader plot. The Utah Republican, a member of the Homeland Security Committee, urged investigators to look into whether the suspects were part of a larger terror network. "I don't think it's necessarily just two kids who watched some YouTube videos and went awry and decided to do this mayhem," Chaffetz said on C-SPAN's "Washington Journal" program. "No, I worry that they were radicalized in a way that others may have also been radicalized." Chaffetz described the suspects -- Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who is dead, and his brother -- as "punks." The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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