FBI: Boston Police Helped Investigate Tamerlan Tsarnaev in 2011

Though Boston’s top police officials said he did not know about the now-deceased Boston Marathon bomber until the day he was killed, an FBI official said at least some Boston police officers had access to a file on him through a shared database.

FBI special agent Richard Deslauriers said in a Thursday press statement members of the Joint Terrorism Task Force, a federally-sponsored unit that included Boston police officials, assessed accused marathon bomber Tameraln Tsarnaev in 2011 via the Guardian database, an internal system shared by law enforcement at the federal, state and local levels.

“Many state and local departments, including the [Boston Police Department], have representatives who are full-time members of the [Joint Terrorism Task Force], and specifically had representatives assigned to the Joint Terrorism Task Force squad that conducted the 2011 Assessment of deceased terrorism suspect, Tamerlan Tsarnaev,” the press statement says.

The Joint Terrorism Task Force is a “collaborative environment that allows for the completely unrestricted flow of investigative information among task force members,” the statement continued.

Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis said told the House Committee on Homeland Security Thursday morning that his department did not receive information on Tsarnaev until the week of the attack, according to The Boston Globe.

The Globe reported that three Boston Police officials were also members of the Joint Terrorism Task Force.

It has been widely reported that Tsarnaev, a native Chechen living in Cambridge, traveled to the Chechen region and read bomb-making instructions from Jihadist websites.

Tsarnaev, along with his brother Dzokhar who is in custody of law enforcement, are accused of setting off two bombs near the finish line of the Boston Marathon April 15, killing three and injuring over 260.