New York Republican Rep. Peter King said that a forthcoming House Homeland Security Committee report details investigative errors by the FBI that made the Boston Marathon terrorist attack “more likely to succeed.”
“When the report comes out, I believe it will show – and I’ve seen the final draft of the report – that there was not sufficient cooperation between the FBI and Boston police prior to the Marathon Bombing,” King told the Massachusetts political website Red Mass Group.
“In that they [the FBI] never told the Boston Police that the older brother was under surveillance, or that the Russians had given us information on him. They kept that to themselves,” King said.
“Whether or not that would have prevented the Boston Marathon bombing, it certainly made it more likely to succeed,” King added.
The Daily Caller reported April 23 that the FBI did not contact the Tsarnaev brother’s mosque in the aftermath of the April 15, 2013 bombing.
The Islamic Society of Boston (ISB), the Cambridge, Mass., mosque attended by Boston Marathon bombing suspects Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, contacted the FBI to identify the suspects on Friday, April 19, a mosque spokeswoman confirmed to the Daily Caller.
The FBI did not contact the mosque in the four days after the Monday attack and had no communication with the mosque until the ISB reached out the following Friday.
By the time the mosque contacted the FBI, the suspects had allegedly shot an MIT police officer and engaged in a fiery shootout with law enforcement in Watertown, Mass., where Tamerlan was killed.
Bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev currently faces the death penalty.