Laurel J. Sweet Monday, May 16, 2016



Credit: Newscom


The first of Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s three college classmates convicted of helping him cover his tracks and buy time to evade capture will be released from prison Thursday.

Azamat Tazhayakov, 22, now at the Ashland Federal Correctional Institution in Kentucky, has been behind bars since shortly after the April 2013 bombings.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials likely will take Tazhayakov into custody while deportation proceedings are pending against the Kazakhstan national. His student visa was invalid at the time of his 2013 arrest.

Though convicted in 2014 of conspiracy and obstruction of justice, Tazhayakov was not sentenced until last summer, after a federal jury condemned Tsarnaev, 22, to death by lethal injection for the April 15, 2013, terrorist attack in Copley Square that killed three race spectators and led to the murder three days later of MIT police officer Sean Collier and the Watertown shootout that killed his accomplice, brother Tamerlan.

Tsarnaev, housed at the ultra-secure Supermax prison in Florence, Colo., is appealing for a new trial.

His former University of Massachusetts classmates Robel Phillips and Dias Kadyrbayev, both 22, remain housed at low-security federal prisons in Loretto, Pa., and Big Spring, Texas, respectively. They are not due to get out until 2018.

At Tsarnaev’s urging, Tazhayakov, Kadyrbayev and Phillipos went to his dorm room the evening of April 18, 2013, after his and Tamerlan’s images were released by the FBI as the bombing suspects, but still hours before the Tsarnaevs would kill Collier in cold blood in his MIT cruiser in a failed bid to steal his sidearm. None of the friends breathed a word about Tsarnaev to authorities.

Tazhayakov was found guilty of helping remove a backpack containing fireworks, a jar of Vaseline and a computer thumb drive belonging to Tsarnaev that were later unearthed from a landfill in New Bedford.

Prosecutors said Tsarnaev had once told Tazhayakov over dinner he knew how to build a bomb and that “it was good to die a martyr as you would die with a smile on your face and go straight to heaven.”

Tsarnaev pal set to be released from prison