The Guardian
March 10, 2015
Sparks flew in a federal courtroom in Boston on Tuesday in the trial of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev – the younger and only survivor of two brothers accused of perpetrating the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing – as the testimony of an FBI agent and witness for the prosecution collapsed under cross-examination by the defence.
Tsarnaev’s defence attorney Miriam Conrad surgically deconstructed testimony given late on Monday by an FBI agent that looked at Tsarnaev’s Twitter accounts – and embarrassed the FBI by showing them to have misidentified a picture of a mosque in Grozny, Chechnya, as the Muslim holy site of Mecca.
On Monday, FBI special agent Steven Kimball showed the court the front page of a second Twitter account that he alleged also belonged to Tsarnaev, and read out tweets from his separate personal account that played into the prosecution’s picture of Tsarnaev as a callous, radicalised killer.
On Tuesday, when Conrad placed those tweets in context, much of Kimball’s testimony was made to look like the result of cynically selective representation by the prosecution.
