The New York Time
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE
BOSTON — Robel Phillipos, the former University of Massachusetts student who is accused of lying to the authorities investigating the Boston Marathon bombings, will seek to be released from federal custody on Monday, his lawyers said in court papers filed over the weekend.
The lawyers said that Mr. Phillipos, 19, had nothing to do with the bombings and was frightened and confused when he was interrogated about going with two other friends to the college dorm room of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of the two chief suspects in the case, and removing a backpack and fireworks that the investigators consider to be evidence. The other suspect, Mr. Tsarnaev’s older brother, Tamerlan, 26, was killed after a shootout with the police.
As Washington gears up this week for its first hearings on the Boston Marathon bombings, Representative Peter King, Republican of New York, said Sunday that he believed the brothers did not act alone.
“It’s very difficult to believe that these two could have carried out this level of attack with this level of sophistication and precision acting by themselves, either without training from overseas or having at least facilitators here at home,” Mr. King, a former chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, said on the CNN program “State of the Union.”
Noting that there were multiple explosive devices involved, he added: “No, I think there had to be assistance, and that’s why the F.B.I., I think, is going after this so vigorously and effectively.”
So far, only Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has been charged in carrying out the bombings, which killed three people and injured more than 260 others on April 15 near the finish line of Boston’s prestigious race.
Three friends of Mr. Tsarnaev were picked up last week and held on related charges. They include Mr. Phillipos, who was charged with making false statements to federal authorities. He is to appear in Federal District Court in Boston on Monday and will ask to be released on bond, his lawyers said.
In a criminal complaint filed last week, federal investigators said that Mr. Phillipos gave three different versions of events on the night of April 18 — the day that the F.B.I. released photographs of two men whom the authorities had identified as suspects — until he admitted that he and two other friends went to Mr. Tsarnaev’s dorm room on the campus of the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.
The other two friends — Azamat Tazhayakov and Dias Kadyrbayev, originally from Kazakhstan — have been charged with obstruction of justice and destroying evidence, and each face a five-year prison sentence and $250,000 in fines. They are to appear in court next week. Mr. Phillipos, an American, faces a stiffer sentence: eight years in prison and $250,000 in fines.
Mr. Phillipos’s lawyers, Derege B. Demissie and Susan B. Church, said in the court papers that the charges against their client were “refutable.”
They said that he was no longer enrolled at the college and had not seen Mr. Tsarnaev or the others for two months. Then, by “sheer coincidence and bad luck,” he happened to be on campus for a seminar on April 18.
Mr. Phillipos, who attended high school with Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, was questioned a number of times without a lawyer present, his lawyers wrote.
“This case is about a frightened and confused 19-year-old who was subjected to intense questioning and interrogation, without the benefit of counsel and in the context of one of the worst attacks against the nation,” the lawyers wrote. “The weight of the federal government under such circumstances can have a devastatingly crushing effect on the ability of an adolescent to withstand the enormous pressure and respond rationally.”
In an attempt to show that Mr. Phillipos is not a flight risk, his lawyers said he “comes from a well-educated family and was raised by a hard-working single mother” as she pursued three college degrees, including a bachelor’s degree in political science from Northeastern University and a master’s degree in social work from Boston University.
His mother, Genet Bekele, is a social worker who emigrated from Ethiopia, lives in Cambridge and specializes in handling domestic violence cases. She filed one of several affidavits attesting to her son’s character, saying she had raised him “with Christian values and taught him the value of working hard.”
“My whole family is in complete shock over the accusation made against him,” she said.
The House Committee on Homeland Security has scheduled hearings on the bombings for Thursday.
“This will be the first in a series of hearings, as part of a broader investigation into the Boston Marathon bombings,” Representative Michael McCaul, Republican of Texas, who is chairman of the committee, said last week in announcing the hearings.
He said the attacks had been carried out “by radical Islamist terrorists,” and added: “Four lives were lost, and hundreds of others were forever changed. As our nation recovers, it is imperative that we understand what happened, what signs may have been missed and what we can improve.”
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