Officials: No Sign ‘Misha’ Tied To Boston Bombing

U.S. officials say investigators have found no evidence that a conservative Muslim friend of Tamerlan Tsarnaev had any connection to the Boston Marathon bombing.

Tsarnaev is one of two suspects in the bombing. He died in a shootout with police.

Family members have said he grew up religiously apathetic but hardened his Islamic views in 2008 or 2009 under the influence of a Muslim convert, known to the family as Misha.

Two U.S. officials close to the investigation say the FBI has identified an individual believed to be Misha. The officials would not say whether the FBI has spoken to him but say they've found no ties to the attack or terrorism in general.

The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the case.

Russia had wiretap on bomb suspect

U.S. officials say Russian authorities secretly recorded a conversation in 2011 in which one of the Boston bombing suspects vaguely discussed jihad with his mother.

Officials say a second call was recorded between the suspects' mother and a man under FBI investigation living in southern Russia.

The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the ongoing case.

They say the Russians shared this intelligence with the U.S. in the past few days.

The conversations are significant because, had they been revealed earlier, there might have been enough evidence for the FBI to initiate a more thorough investigation of the Boston bombing suspects' family.

FBI finishes landfill search near Mass. college

The FBI has concluded its search of a landfill near a Massachusetts college where the 19-year-old suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings was a student.

FBI spokeswoman Laura Eimiller says the two-day search ended Friday. Eimiller wouldn't say what investigators were looking for or whether they recovered anything from the landfill.

Bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev  was a sophomore at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth. Students say he returned to the campus after the bombings.

Two of his college friends were detained April 20 and were being held at a Boston jail for violating their student visas by not regularly attending classes. A lawyer for one says the two students have been interviewed by FBI agents, cooperated fully and aren't suspects in the attack.

Also, two college buddies of the suspect have been questioned, but a lawyer says they had nothing to do with the attacks. He says the two are being detained in a Boston jail for violating their student visas by not regularly attending classes.

And U.S. officials said his mother had been added to a federal terrorism database months before the April 15 attack. His mother said it's all "lies."

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