NEW YORK (AP) — Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s sister was arrested Wednesday on suspicion she threatened to bomb a woman who previously had a romantic relationship with her boyfriend.
Ailina Tsarnaeva, who lives in North Bergen, New Jersey, made the threat against an upper Manhattan woman via telephone on Monday, police said. She turned herself in at a Manhattan police precinct, and police charged her with aggravated harassment.
Several media outlets reported Tsarnaeva told the Harlem woman she had “people who can go over there and put a bomb on you.”
Officers gave Tsarnaeva an appearance ticket and released her pending a Sept. 30 court date.
A telephone number linked to Tsarnaeva was disconnected. Her lawyer, George Gormley, said he had left his office and would speak Thursday.
Tsarnaeva has been required to check in with Massachusetts probation officers since prosecutors said she failed to cooperate with a 2010 counterfeiting investigation.
Prosecutors said Tsarnaeva picked up someone who passed a counterfeit bill at a restaurant at a Boston mall and “lied about certain salient facts during the investigation.”
At a hearing last October, Gormley said Tsarnaeva was pregnant with her second child and was unlikely to flee.
Tsarnaeva once lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at an apartment linked to her brothers, Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who were the subjects of an intense manhunt in the Boston area in the days after the deadly April 2013 marathon bombing.
Records show Tsarnaeva now lives with a sister, Bella Tsarnaeva.
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is charged with building and planting the two pressure cooker bombs that exploded near the marathon’s finish line, killing three people and injuring more than 260 others. He has pleaded not guilty.
Tamerlan Tsarnaev died after a gunbattle with police.
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Quite the model family, I must say.
Obviously a stupid thing for anyone to say, but if your family name is Tsarnaev, it’s like wearing a neon sandwich sign that says, “ARREST ME!”
I guess every family rises to its own level of dysfunction.