Boston manhunt ends; second suspect nabbed alive

The manhunt for the second suspect in the Boston bombing ended in dramatic fashion late on Friday when law enforcement authorities cornered - and caught alive - Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who had been on the run.

The Boston Police Department put out this message

Tsarnaev was cornered in a boat parked in the backyard of a home in Watertown, a residential neighbourhood in Boston.

The neighbourhood cheered as Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was taken away in a police car.

Earlier, wire services reported that funfire erupted and police in armoured vehicles and tactical gear rushed into Watertown. The burst of activity came at the end of a tense day in and around Boston, and less than an hour after police announced that they were scaling back the hunt because they had come up empty-handed following an all-day search that sent thousands of SWAT team officers into the streets and paralysed the metropolitan area.

AP reported: Less than an hour after the hail of gunfire, a round of blasts could be heard. A state police spokesman said only that the activity was related to the search for 19-year-old college student Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.

Boston Mayor Tom Menino told WBZ-TV the suspect was holed up in a boat parked in a backyard. Reporters were being kept away from the scene.

Before the gunfire, State Police Col. Timothy Alben said at a news conference that he believed Tsarnaev was still in Massachusetts because of his ties to the area. But authorities lifted the stay-indoors warning for people in the Boston area, and the transit system started running again by evening.

“We can’t continue to lockdown an entire city or an entire state,” Alben said. At the same time, he and other authorities warned that Tsarnaev is a killer and that people should be vigilant.

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.

Law enforcement officials and family members identified the brothers as ethnic Chechens who came to the US from Russia. They lived near Boston and had been in the US for about a decade, an uncle said.

Around midday, as the manhunt dragged on, the suspects’ uncle Ruslan Tsarni of Montgomery Village, Md., pleaded on television: “Dzhokhar, if you are alive, turn yourself in and ask for forgiveness.”

The search by thousands of law enforcement officers all but paralyzed the Boston area for much of the day. Officials shut down all mass transit, including Amtrak trains to New York, advised businesses not to open, and warned close to 1 million people in the entire city and some of its suburbs to stay inside and unlock their doors only for uniformed police.

“We believe this man to be a terrorist,” Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis said. “We believe this to be a man who’s come here to kill people.”

Some neighborhoods resembled a military encampment, with officers patrolling with guns drawn and aimed, residents peering nervously from windows and people near surrounded buildings spirited away.

The bloody turn in the case came just hours after the FBI released photos and video of two suspects in the bombing and asked for the public’s help in identifying and catching them.

Authorities said the man dubbed Suspect No. 1 - the one in sunglasses and a dark baseball cap in the surveillance-camera pictures - was Tamerlan Tsarnaev, while Suspect No. 2, the one in a white baseball cap worn backward, was his brother.

The bombings on Monday near the Boston Marathon finish line killed three people and wounded more than 180, tearing off limbs in a spray of shrapnel and sparking fears across the nation that another terrorist attack had come to US soil.

With inputs from wire services