Tsarnaev Brothers, Parents Received More Than $100,000 in State Assistance
Documents are said to reveal that the Tsarnaev family, including the suspected terrorists and their parents, received more than $100,000 in taxpayer-funded assistance.
The state has reportedly given about 500 documents to an 11-member House Post Audit and Oversight Committee, detailing that the assistance was in the form of food stamps, housing and cash with the family receiving the benefits between 2002 and 2012, according to The Boston Herald.
The congressional committee met for the first time on Monday and heard testimony from officials with the Department of Transitional Assistance.
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"The breadth of the benefits the family was receiving was stunning," a person close with the committee told
The Herald.
A full investigation was pledged by the committee's chairman, state Rep. David Linsky (D-Natick).
"I can assure members of the public that this committee will actively review every single piece of information we can find because clearly the public has a substantial right to know what benefits, if any, this family or individuals accused of some horrific crimes were receiving," Linsky said in a statement.
Linsky's committee has requested documents from the DTA, the state's Medicaid director and Health and Human Services Secretary John Polanowicz. The documents have yet to be made public due to privacy law the DTA is exercising.
Recent reports also pointed to a deleted Instagram account that had been linked to the younger Tsarnaev, which was taken down shortly before the Boston attack.
Reports indicate that the profile belonging to the user name "jmaster1," was Tsarnaev which showed he had "liked" a photo of Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev.
The deleted Instagram account also contained pictures that were "liked" of another pro-Chechnya image and included several hashtags: #FreeChechenia #Jihad #Jannah #ALLAH #Jesus and #God.
While investigators maintain that the liking of pictures of controversial figures does not make anyone a terrorist, it does help when compiling a psychological profile of the accused terrorist.
"If I were an investigator right now, obviously the platform he deleted matters the most," Juliette Kayyem, a CNN terrorism analyst, said during a recent interview.
