BREAKING: Boston Bombing Suspect Dzhokar Tsarnaev Captured After Watertown Standoff

UPDATE 8:47 p.m. ET: Fox News reports that police sources say Dzhokar Tsarnaev has been taken into custody and is being transported in an ambulance from the scene of a standoff in Watertown, Massachusetts.

UPDATE 9:23 p.m. ET: Kevin Johnson, Donna Leinwand Leger and Gary Strauss report for USA Today:

Police cornered and captured Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev Friday night.
The Boston Police Department arrested the 19-year-old at about 8:45 p.m., after finding him holed up in a boat stored in the backyard of a Watertown residence. He was led to an ambulance and driven away from the scene. …
At about 7 p.m., gunshots erupted in a Watertown residential neighborhood, with Tsarnaev discovered in a covered boat resting on a towing trailer alongside of a clapboard home on Franklin Street. He may have been wounded in a early Friday morning firefight with police that killed older brother Tamerlan Tsarnaev.
Police were tipped off by a resident who saw blood spatters on the boat, climbed up a ladder to open the tarp cover and discovered the suspect. Hundreds of police on the scene surrounded the area …

Another press conference in Watertown is expected to begin shortly.

UPDATE 9:37 p.m. ET: A photo captured the scene as Boston Mayor Thomas Menino was told, “We got him”:

* * * * * * * * *

PREVIOUSLY — 7:07 p.m. ET

Less than an hour after officials held a press conference Friday afternoon, there were reports of shots fired in the Boston suburb of Watertown, where police were conducting a manhunt for 19-year-old Dzhokar Tsarnaev, the “armed and dangerous” surviving suspect in the terror bombing of Monday’s Boston Marathon.

UPDATE: Fox News says sources tell them “the suspect is down.”

UPDATE II: Shortly after the press conference, police reportedly got a tip that the suspect — whose older brother died after an early-morning shootout with cops — might be hiding on Franklin Street in Watertown.

UPDATE III: Law enforcement authorities had named Dzhokar Tsarnaev as the FBI’s “Suspect Two,” who was identified from surveillance video as one of the perpetrators of Monday’s bomb attacks that killed three people and wounded more than 170 near the finish line of the annual Boston Marathon. It was the younger Tsarnaev who was photographed in a white cap placing a backpack bomb near an 8-year-old boy who was killed by the blast.

UPDATE IV: The latest Tweets and reports from the hot #MANHUNT hashtag:

There are reports that the suspect is hiding inside a boat in the backyard of a home, and that there is now a police standoff with Tsarnaev, who may have been wounded in the exchange of gunfire.

UPDATE V: From the Twitter feed of Fox25 Boston:

UPDATE V: The standoff is reportedly at 67 Franklin Street. It is being reported that the homeowner found blood near a boat behind the house, which indicates that Tsarnaev might have been wounded in the early-morning shootout with police in the Watertown neighborhood. The suspect’s older brother Tamerlan Tsarnaev was killed in that confrontation, police say. The Associated Press reports:

Tsarnaev fled on foot after a furious overnight gun battle that left 200 spent rounds behind and after a wild car chase in which he and his brother hurled explosives at police, authorities said. His brother, 26-year-old Tamerlan Tsarnaev, died in the shootout, run over by his younger brother in a car as he lay wounded, according to investigators.
During the overnight spasm of violence, the brothers also shot and killed an MIT policeman and severely wounded another officer, authorities said.

Related posts