Boston bombing suspect's family struggles to find burial site

BOSTON (Reuters) - The body of suspected Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev remained in limbo on Monday as his family searched for a cemetery that would accept the remains.

Several Massachusetts cemeteries have refused to bury Tsarnaev, and protesters have staked out the Worcester funeral home holding the body. Despite a plea from the funeral home director, Governor Deval Patrick said on Monday he would not get involved.

The controversy marked a rare period of discord in a state that was largely united after the attacks on one of its marquee events.

Tsarnaev, 26, died in a gun battle with police on April 19, four days after bombs he is believed to have set with his younger brother Dzhokhar killed three people and injured another 264 near the finish line of the world-famous marathon.

Relatives have said they want him buried nearby. Under Islamic law, the body cannot be cremated, a procedure used for criminals including Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh.

"The whole situation is unprecedented," said David Walkinshaw, a spokesman for the Massachusetts Funeral Directors Association. The state of Massachusetts does not own its own cemeteries, he said, and the federal government has only cemeteries for war veterans.

"The challenge here is that there's no way to demand a cemetery allow for a burial to take place," Walkinshaw said.

Some Massachusetts residents want the body sent back to Tsarnaev's native Russia. William Breault of Worcester told reporters on Monday he had set up a bank account to raise funds to ship the remains.

"I not only don't want to see him buried in Worcester, Massachusetts. ... I don't think he should be buried in the state," Breault told CNN.

In Washington, State Department spokesman Patrick Ventrell said he was not aware that anyone from Russia or Massachusetts had contacted the department about it. "We're unaware of any efforts to coordinate sending his remains to Russia," he said.

Gabriel Gomez, a Massachusetts Republican candidate for U.S. Senate, suggested disposing of Tsarnaev's body in the ocean as was done after U.S. forces killed Osama bin Laden in 2011.

"Bureaucrats worried about where to bury Boston Marathon terrorist #1. To me, it's simple: he should be buried at sea with Bin Laden," he wrote on his official Twitter account.

UNWILLING TO ACCEPT BODY

Tsarnaev's body was taken to Graham Putnam & Mahoney Funeral Parlors in Worcester last week after spending more than a week at a medical examiner's office in Boston. Several cemeteries have said they would not accept Tsarnaev's body for burial.

Graham Putnam funeral home owner Peter Stefan, chairman of a board that oversees funeral services and embalming in Massachusetts, said he has an obligation to accept the remains.

Stefan has said he would seek help from state officials if he could not find a resting place soon. His work has drawn support from other funeral directors, including Morgan Mitchell, another member of the state board.

"There are funeral directors in Massachusetts who have buried people who have been murderers or child molesters. As professionals, we need to put these things to one side," Mitchell said.

Tsarnaev's uncle, Ruslan Tsarni, said on Sunday that his nephew should be buried in Massachusetts, where he lived. Tsarnaev's parents, ethnic Chechens who returned to southern Russia several years ago, have suggested in various interviews and reports that their son should be buried in Cambridge or returned to Russia.

The Massachusetts governor declined on Monday to get involved.

"This is a family issue ... and the family needs to make some decisions. I understand they have some options. They need to exercise one soon," Patrick told reporters.

Cambridge officials urged the Tsarnaevs to look elsewhere.

"The difficult and stressful efforts of the citizens of the City of Cambridge to return to a peaceful life would be adversely impacted by the turmoil, protests and widespread media presence at such an interment," said Cambridge City Manager Robert Healy in a statement Sunday.

"The families of loved ones interred in the Cambridge Cemetery also deserve to have their deceased family members rest in peace."

By Ross Kerber and Aaron Pressman (Additional reporting by Tabassum Zakaria in Washington; Editing by Cynthia Osterman, Doina Chiacu and Philip Barbara)

Via Yahoo News!

Israeli scholars say biblical burial box genuine (AP)

JERUSALEM – Israeli scholars have confirmed the authenticity of a 2,000-year-old burial box that appears to bear the name of a relative of the high priest Caiaphas mentioned in the New Testament, the Israel Antiquities Authority said Wednesday.

The find offers support for the existence of the biblical Caiaphas, who appears in the New Testament as a temple priest and an adversary of Jesus who played a key role in his crucifixion.

The ossuary — a stone chest used to store bones — is decorated with the stylized shapes of flowers and bears an inscription with the name "Miriam daughter of Yeshua son of Caiaphas, priest of Maaziah from Beth Imri."

The ossuary was seized from tomb robbers three years ago, the government antiquities body said in a statement. Because it "was not found in a controlled archaeological excavation and because of its special scientific importance," the statement said, it has been undergoing lab tests since then.

The tests, which used powerful microscopes to inspect layers of buildup on the box and inscription, were carried out by two scholars, one from Tel Aviv University and the other from Bar Ilan University, the statement said. The research indicated that the inscription is "genuine and ancient."

Careful tests were necessary because forgery is common in the world of biblical artifacts, where a brisk black market exists and where antiquities linked in some way to the Bible can fetch millions of dollars.

A similar ossuary — bearing the inscription "James son of Joseph brother of Jesus" — is currently at the center of a fraud trial under way in Israel.

The James ossuary was exhibited to widespread acclaim as the only known archaeological link to Jesus, but lab tests run by the Israel Antiquities Authority indicated the inscription was fake. An Israeli collector has been charged with forging the ossuary and other biblical antiquities, and a verdict is pending. The collector says the box is authentic.

The scholars believe the Miriam ossuary was plundered from a tomb in the Valley of Elah, southwest of Jerusalem.

The word "maaziah" on the inscription refers to a subset of the priestly caste. Scholars believe "Beth Imri" refers either to a priestly family or to the family's village of origin.

Yahoo! News

Questions emerge over burial at sea

Osama bin Laden was buried at sea early Monday morning in conformance with Islamic rites, U.S. officials said.

The move raised questions about the government's motive and how it would prove the body was bin Laden's. "The burial at sea gives the whole story an air of incredulity," said Mahmoud Ayoub, professor of Islamic Studies at Hartford Seminary. "That means there are no remains to verify the whole story."

Pentagon and intelligence officials said they've taken several steps to identify bin Laden, including visual and photo identifications and a DNA analysis. The officials, who spoke at a briefing, could not be identified by name under the ground rules set by the Pentagon.

The Obama administration is considering releasing photos of bin Laden's body, Deputy national security adviser John Brennan said at a White House briefing.

After he was shot in the head in a firefight with U.S. Navy SEALs, bin Laden's body was taken to the USS Carl Vinson, an aircraft carrier in the North Arabian Sea, where it was washed, placed on a white sheet and put in a weighted bag.

An officer read religious remarks, which were translated into Arabic by a native speaker. The body was then placed on a board and eased into the sea, a Pentagon official said.

Bin Laden was buried within 24 hours of his death.

"It was taken care of in the appropriate way," Brennan said. "It was determined that it was in the best interests of all involved that this burial take place, again, according to Islamic requirements, at sea."

Under Islamic rites, a person must be buried as quickly as possible. The most dignified place for burial is in the ground, Ayoub said. Muslims consider remains buried at sea to be lost, not buried, he said.

"Burial at sea is not acceptable," he said.

Before disposing of the body, the government compared bin Laden's DNA to that of several family members. Pentagon officials did not say which family members.

"You're asking the question: Are these two people related to each other, and how?" said Frederick Bieber, a geneticist at the Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston.

The best source of DNA for comparison would be from bin Laden himself, said Mitchell Holland, director of the forensic science program at Penn State.

Next would be his children. Siblings aren't as useful, because they inherit only half of each parent's DNA and what each inherits could be different.

Holland said government scientists probably looked for rare, short DNA variations in bin Laden's relatives and then checked for those same rare variations in him.

Unrelated people might share common variations by chance, Bieber said, but sharing a lot "favors that you're related."

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72 bodies at burial site as Mexicans seek missing

By Alexandre Meneghini, AP

People wait to know if missing relatives are among bodies found Wednesday in a mass grave in Matamoros, northern Mexico.

EnlargeCloseBy Alexandre Meneghini, AP

People wait to know if missing relatives are among bodies found Wednesday in a mass grave in Matamoros, northern Mexico.

Finally a strange man answered: "Stop bothering me. He doesn't have this phone anymore. If you keep bothering me, you'll see what happens."

Though he had yet to identify the body, Cote said his father's driver's license was recovered in one of the graves as people across Mexico contacted authorities in search of the disappeared, including dozens who vanished from buses as they crossed the same part of northern Mexico headed to the United States.

Federal authorities said they have 14 people in custody related to the second mass killing in violent Tamaulipas state, the scene of a massacre of 72 migrants last August.

But no one could explain the horror of innocent civilians pulled off buses and out of cars on a well-traveled stretch of highway patrolled by the Mexican military that runs near the Gulf Coast to the U.S. border.

"How sick do you have to be to commit such atrocities," said Cote, whose 55-year-old father traveled from their home in central Tlaxcala state to pick up a minivan in late March. The family buys and sells used cars.

"Killing and mutilating people just because you can," Cote, 32, said amid the stench outside the morgue in Matamoros, a city across the border from Brownsville, Texas, where the bodies were taken.

As investigators looked for more mass graves, calls from people and state governments around Mexico about the missing shed new light on the problem of the drug war's disappeared. More than 34,600 people have died in drug-related violence since President Felipe Calderon launched his offensive against organized crime in late 2006, but no one knows how many people are missing at the hands of drug cartels.

The National Human Rights Commission recently reported it has registered 5,397 people who have gone missing since 2006, but stressed they were not all drug-related. Spokesman Cesar Correa said such a study has never been done.

All day on Friday families were turned away in Matamoros as morgue officials said they would have no information until at least Monday. State authorities are still not sure about the origin of the victims found in the pits.

The majority of victims were men, though four women were among the bodies that authorities started to recover on April 1 while investigating reports that gunmen had begun stopping buses and pulling off some passengers in the area in late March.

Federal security spokesman Alejandro Poire said the suspects led authorities to the pits. The suspects belonged to a "criminal cell," he said, but he did not specify which one.

Authorities speculate the men pulled off the buses fell victim to ever more brutal recruiting efforts by cartels to replenish their ranks. But one local politician, who didn't want to be quoted by name for safety reasons, said there were rumors that the Gulf cartel was sending buses of people to fight its rival, the Zetas, who control that stretch of road and who began boarding buses in search of enemies.

Investigators interviewing witnesses on the bus abductions calculated that from 65 to 82 people went missing, according to Tamaulipas state Tamaulipas state Interior Secretary Morelos Canseco.

Some who came to the morgue had no reason to believe their missing relatives would have been in San Fernando in late March, when the complaints first came in.

Margarita Avellaneda, 41, clutched the flier she has posted around Matamoros since her husband disappeared in October. Gustavo Contreras, 54, was looking for a cousin also not heard from since October as he hitched a ride with the San Fernando mayor-elect. Both vanished.

Ambrosio Leon Rodriguez, 60, came looking for his brother-in-law, who has been missing since he went to board a bus in February in the Tamaulipas port city of Tampico.

"We don't know why they disappeared, but we want to know if they're here," said Avellaneda, whose husband went to pick up a friend near their home in Matamoros. Neither have been heard from since.

Griselda Guerrero, 22, said her relatives disappeared on a bus in Tamaulipas in March 2010 as they headed with other migrants to the U.S. They never found a trace of the bus or the passengers, she said.

Tamaulipas authorities have heard from officials in several states across Mexico looking for residents reported missing from buses that had crossed Tamaulipas, Canseco said.

Suana Montero, a spokeswoman for the Guanajuato state attorney general, said 17 residents of the state haven't been heard from since taking an Omnibus de Mexico bus to northern Mexico in March. The bus route and exact date were unknown, but Montero said they were apparently traveling to the United States.

An official with the Mexican Attorney General's Office said 43 residents of the central states of Queretaro, Hidalgo and San Luis Potosi headed to the U.S. in buses disappeared in March and early April. The official agreed to disclose those details only if she wasn't quoted by name because she was not authorized to talk about the investigation.

"We have information that they got to the state of Tamaulipas," the official said.

Relatives who have filed missing-person reports across Mexico are sending DNA samples to Mexico City, she added.

Michoacan state Attorney General Jesus Mandujano said at least 13 residents of that western state have disappeared in Tamaulipas. In addition, Mandujano said, an unknown number of people from the city of Uruapan went missing while traveling in a bus to Tamaulipas.

Canseco told the Milenio television channel that he had yet to hear from other countries, particularly those in Central America, the origin of thousands of migrants who cross Mexico each year on their way to the U.S.

The victims of the massacre last August were from El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Ecuador and Brazil. Survivors said they were killed for refusing to work for the Zetas drug cartel. Fourteen of those bodies still have not been identified.

Although a federal offensive has been underway in the region since November, criminals have become so brazen they apparently kidnapped the bus passengers on a stretch of highway that area people say lay between two military checkpoints.

Cote said he and his father, also named Pablo Cote, traveled the road often between Tlaxcala and Tamaulipas for their used-car business, passing through military and federal police roadblocks. He said they knew about the dead migrants and heard stories of crimes along the road, but they never saw anything strange.

When they were in San Fernando, sometimes they would see armed men, Cote said.

"There they are," the locals would say.

He said his father arrived in San Fernando by bus on March 30 and stayed only a few hours before heading back to Tlaxcala. He told his son he would call when he reached Tampico. He was never heard from again. He left behind Cote and four daughters.

The family did everything together.

"I don't have words," Cote said. "My family is destroyed ... as the days go by, the pain only increases."

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