Richmond, Virginia:
Boston Marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev has been buried in a Muslim cemetery in Virginia, after authorities spent a week searching for a final resting place for the ethnic Chechen's remains.
The body of Tsarnaev, who was killed in a shootout with police three days after the April 15 bombing, was moved earlier this week from the Graham Putnam & Mahoney funeral home in Worcester, Massachusetts, police there said on Thursday.
The funeral home had faced unrelenting protests over the past week as it struggled to find a cemetery willing to accept the body.
Tsarnaev, 26, and his brother Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, were suspected by the Federal Bureau of Investigation of setting off bombs at the finish line of the Boston Marathon, killing three people and injuring 264. Dzhokhar is in a prison west of Boston after being charged with crimes that could carry the death penalty if he is convicted.
On Friday, the city of Boston released an updated death certificate for Tsarnaev showing that he was buried in Al-Barzakh Muslim Cemetery in Doswell, Virginia, outside Richmond.
Ammar Amonette, imam of the Virginia Islamic center, said he disapproved of the decision.
"It was done by individuals without our knowledge or consent," Amonette said. "We are quite upset. It's affected thousands of Muslims and we were not consulted. It has nothing to do with us."
Representatives of another Islamic center in the area, the Islamic Society of Greater Richmond, could not immediately be reached.
Tamerlan Tsarnaev, an ethnic Chechen who lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for much of the past decade, had been on a U.S. government database of potential terrorism suspects. The United States had twice been warned by Russia that he might be an Islamic militant, according to U.S. security officials.
His body was moved from the Boston medical examiner's office to the Worcester funeral home, but his family did not claim the body and the cities of Boston and Cambridge refused to accept his remains.
Worcester police said on Thursday a person had approached them with a solution for the body after a public plea for help. Police withheld the identify of that person.
© Thomson Reuters 2013